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Murray, the Zelig

Note:
Henry Murray, Professor of Psychology at Harvard, played a key role in CIA psychological experimentation going back to his involvement with the OSS during World War II, as this chapter explains.

By a great biographical irony, I had already come to know Henry Murray quite well at Harvard in the early 1970’s, before I knew anything about the role of the CIA—or the alleged role of LSD—in my father’s death. My own critical response to Murray’s Thematic Apperception Test was one of the factors that led to my work on the collage method.
— Eric Olson

In giving the six unwitting Harvard seniors LSD that spring of 1954, Dr. Hyde was motivated by the highest ideals. He and his colleagues believed that by studying the effects of this drug on the brain, they might find a cure for mental illness. But the CIA was paying his bills, and it had a different agenda in mind. The agency wanted a drug, as LSD historians Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain put it, that would “blow minds and make people crazy.”

University researchers would soon discover that, like Dr. Faustus, the legendary Renaissance magician who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power, they had signed a contract before reading the fine print. And the fine print contained an ethical trap: Saving the world required the sacrifice—of others. In the name of the highest ideals, some would commit the lowest of crimes. Others, while not quite doing evil, simply lost their ethical direction. For both, this journey from high to low was such a gradual descent that many did not notice.

And among these fellow travelers would be Professor Murray
himself.

***

The agency’s interest began with its precursor, the OSS, in 1942, when General Donovan, anxious to perfect interrogation techniques for captured spies, established a “truth drug” committee of prominent psychologists, including Dr. Winfred Overholser, superintendent of St. Elizabethís hospital in Washington, D.C., and Dr. Edward Strecker, president of the American Psychiatric Association. The committee began testing a wide variety of chemicals on test subjects, from peyote and marijuana to “goofball” concoctions of sedatives and stimulants.

The following year, an obscure Swiss chemist named Albert Hoffmann, working for the Sandoz pharmaceutical company, accidentally imbibed a concoction he had created while looking for a circulation stimulant. The chemical was D-lysergic acid diethylamide, better known today as LSD. Without warning, Hoffmann found himself experiencing what was the world’s first acid trip. Coincidentally, at the same time, across the Rhine River in Germany, Nazi doctors were testing another hallucinogenic drug, mescaline, on inmates at the Dachau concentration camp.

The discovery of the Nazis’ Dachau notes after the war by U.S. Navy investigators triggered intense interest in mescaline in American intelligence circles. But it also generated alarm. The field of psychoactive drugs, it seemed, was yet another defense-related area in which the Nazis had been ahead of the Allies. To snatch up these Nazi experts in the dark sciences before the Soviets got them, the Pentagon launched ‘Operation Paperclip,’ a highly secret program to bring some of these German scientists into America. As most had been Nazis, their entry into the United States was prohibited by law. So Paperclip officials smuggled them in, forging, deleting, and doctoring documents to erase evidence of their Nazi past.

Some Paperclip scientists, such as the famous rocket specialist and Nazi Party member Werner von Braun, went to work in the U.S. space program. Others were chemical warfare specialists, experts on everything from sterilization to mass extermination. Among these were members of the former team of doctors already wanted by the U.S. Army war crimes unit for having conducted the ghoulish “high-altitude” (oxygen and pressure deprivation) experiments on Dachau inmates that killed at least seventy. These men would carry on similar research for the U.S. Air Force. Still other Paperclip scientists were sent to Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, where they were put on the CIA payroll and began testing Nazi nerve and mustard gases on unwitting American GIs, seriously injuring several.

Soon, the very same Nazis who had helped to develop nerve gas and “Zyklon B”—tthe gas used to exterminate Jews at Auschwitzówere helping to perfect America’s own “Psychochemical Warfare” program, testing everything from alcohol to LSD on unsuspecting American soldiers. At Edgewood and Fort Holabird, Maryland (where I was stationed as a young second lieutenant in intelligence in 1957-58) at least one thousand soldiers were given up to twenty doses of LSD. Some, locked in boxes and then given LSD, went temporarily insane. Others had epileptic seizures.

In 1949, a Viennese chemist named Otto Kauders gave a lecture on LSD at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, claiming that this newly discovered drug artificially and temporarily induced psychosis. This claim would later be found false — acid trips are not at all like psychosis — but Kaudersís account impressed the hospital staff. If LSD reproduced the symptoms of psychosis, they reasoned, this proved that the disease had a chemical base. So studying LSD’s effects might lead them to drugs for treating mental illness.

Shortly after Kaudersís talk, one hospital staffer, Max Rinkel, ordered a supply of LSD from Sandoz and then persuaded his colleague Robert Hyde to test it on himself. Hyde’s ensuing trip—the first by an American—fired his enthusiasm for further experimentation. Research on one hundred subjects began at Harvard’s Boston Psychopathic under Hyde’s direction in 1950
.
Meanwhile, the CIA was in hot pursuit of the elusive truth drug. After the Soviets’ 1949 show trial of the Hungarian prelate Cardinal JÛzsef Mindszenty, this pursuit turned into a race. At the trial, the cardinal confessed to crimes he clearly didn’t commit, and acted as though he were sleepwalking. Other Soviet show trials demonstrated the same apparent “brainwashing” of prisoners. Later, it would be learned that the Soviets didn’t use drugs at all to accomplish this. Their major weapon was psychology and sleep deprivation. But at the time, the CIA suspected the Soviets had some super-mind-control drug. And they had to have it too.

In 1949, according to John Marks, who first broke the story of CIA experimentation with LSD, the agency’s head of Scientific Intelligence went to Western Europe to learn more about Soviet techniques and to supervise experiments of his own, in order, this official explained, to “apply special methods of interrogation for the purpose of evaluation of Russian practices.” By the spring of 1950, the agency established a special program under its security division named “Operation Bluebird” to test behavior-control methods, and started recruiting university scholars to work for the program. Bluebird scientists began experimenting on North Korean prisoners of war and others. They tried “ice-pick lobotomies,” electroshock, and other “neural-surgical techniques,” as well as a host of drugs including cocaine, heroin, and even something called a “stupid bush,” whose effects remain classified to this day.

To pursue these shadowy endeavors, the government enlisted the elite of the American psychological establishment, either as conduits, consultants, or researchers. According to a later agency review, these helpers included at least ninety-three universities and other governmental or nonprofit organizations, including Harvard, Cornell, the University of Minnesota, the Stanford University School of Medicine, the Lexington, Kentucky, Narcotics Farm, several prisons and penitentiaries, the Office of Naval Research, and the National Institutes of Health.

Project Bluebird was renamed “Project Artichoke” in 1951, and in that same year the CIA discovered LSD. When the Korean War drew to a close the following spring, the CIA’s interest in the drug became an obsession.

As American prisoners of the Chinese were repatriated, authorities discovered to their horror that 70 percent had either made confessions of “guilt” for participating in the war or had signed petitions calling for an end to the U.S. war effort in Asia. Fifteen percent collaborated fully with the Chinese, and only 5 percent refused to cooperate with them at all. Clearly, the Chinese had found new and formidable brainwashing techniques that could transform American servicemen into “Manchurian candidates” programmed to do Communist bidding. America faced a brainwash gap!

Pushing the panic button, in April 1953 the CIA replaced Project Artichoke with a more ambitious effort called MKULTRA, under the direction of Sidney Gottlieb, a brilliant chemist with a degree from CalTech. Gottlieb was the ultimate dirty trickster, having personally participated in attempts to assassinate foreign leaders. And he immediately put his talents to work, this time against Americans.

Once MKULTRA was established, say Lee and Shlain, “almost overnight a whole new market for grants in LSD research sprang into existence as money started pouring through CIA-linked conduits.” Among these conduits was the Josiah J. Macy Foundation, whose director was an ex-OSS officer named Frank Fremont-Smith. And among the beneficiaries of this covert funding would be Harold Abramson, an acquaintance of Gregory Bateson’s, who was an allergist at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital and a CIA consultant to Edgewood Arsenal’s Paperclip scientists. Another was Hydeís group at Boston Psychopathic.

The aim, Gottlieb explained, was “to investigate whether and how it was possible to modify an individual’s behavior by covert means.” LSD, he hoped, would turn out to be the Swiss Army knife of mind control—an all-purpose drug that could ruin a man’s marriage, change his sexual behavior, make him lie or tell the truth, destroy his memory or help him recover it, induce him to betray his country or program him to obey orders or disobey them.

Soon, MKULTRA was testing all conceivable drugs on every kind of victim, including prison inmates, mental patients, foreigners, the terminally ill, homosexuals, and ethnic minorities. Altogether, it conducted tests at fifteen penal and mental institutions, concealing its role by using the U.S. Navy, the Public Health Service, and the National Institute of Mental Health as funding conduits. During the ten years of MKULTRA’s existence, the agency’s inspector general reported after its termination in 1963, the program experimented with “electro-shock, various fields of psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology, graphology, harassment substances, and paramilitary devices and materials.”

Its brainwashing research also took the CIA to Canada, where the agency hired an eminently prestigious psychologist, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, president of the Canadian, American, and World Psychiatric associations and head of the Allen Memorial Institute at McGill University (which had been founded with money from the Rockefeller Foundation). Cameron’s studies centered on what he called “depatterning” and what one CIA operative described as the “creation of a vegetable.” This entailed giving unwitting test subjects bevies of drugs that caused them to sleep for several weeks, virtually straight, with only brief waking intervals. This was followed by up to sixty-five days of powerful electroshock “therapy,” where each jolt was twenty to forty times more intense than standard electroshock treatment. After this program, some were given LSD and put in sensory deprivation boxes for another sixty-five days.

* * *

By the late 1950s, the CIA and LSD had become virtually inseparable. The advent of LSD, Timothy Leary would declare later, “was no accident. It was all planned and scripted by the Central Intelligence.”

Indeed, it was. As Lee and Shlain explain:

Nearly every drug that appeared on the black market during the 1960s — marijuana, cocaine, heroin, PCP, amyl nitrite, mushrooms, DMT, barbiturates, laughing gas, speed and many others — had previously been scrutinized, tested, and in some cases refined by CIA and army scientists. But of all the techniques explored by the Agency in its multimillion-dollar twenty-five-year quest to conquer the human mind, none received as much attention or was embraced with such enthusiasm as LSD-25. For a time CIA personnel were completely infatuated with the hallucinogen. Those who first tested LSD in the early 1950s were convinced that it would revolutionize the cloak-and-dagger trade.

To push its drugs, the CIA sought help from the university elite. In 1969, John Marks reports,

the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs published a fascinating little study designed to curb illegal LSD use. The authors wrote that the drug’s “early use was among small groups of intellectuals at large Eastern and West Coast universities. It spread to undergraduate students, then to other campuses. Most often, users have been introduced to the drug by persons of high status. Teachers have influenced students; upperclassmen have influenced lower classmen.” Calling this a “trickle-down phenomenon,” the authors seem to have correctly analyzed how LSD got around the country. They left out only one vital element, which they had no way of knowing: That somebody had to influence the teachers and that up there at the top of the LSD distribution system could be found the men of MKULTRA.

Fremont-Smith and Abramson were the links between the universities and MKULTRA.

Fremont-Smith organized the conferences that spread the word about LSD to the academic hinterlands. Abramson also gave Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead’s former husband, his first LSD. In 1959 Bateson, in turn, helped arrange for a beat poet friend of his named Allen Ginsberg to take the drug at a research program located off the Stanford campus.

And Murray was part of this drug-testing pyramid. During this time, according to Frank Barron, he had supervised experiments “on the subjective effects of psycho-active drugs, injecting adrenaline . . . into naive subjects to study changes in their subjectivity.” And in 1960, even as the “Multiform Assessments” on Kaczynski and his classmates were underway, Murray had, according to Leary, given his blessing to the latter’s testing psilocybin, an hallucinogen derived from mushrooms, on undergraduates.

In his autobiography, Flashbacks, Leary, who would dedicate the rest of his life to “turning on and tuning out,” described Murray as “the wizard of personality assessment who, as OSS chief psychologist, had monitored military experiments on brainwashing and sodium amytal interrogation. Murray expressed great interest in our drug-research project and offered his support.”

Leary had taken LSD for the first time at Harvard in 1959, where, traveling in Abramson’s orbit, he had attended Fremont-Smithís Macy Foundation conferences on the drug. And Murray, write Lee and Shlain, “took a keen interest in Leary’s work. He volunteered for a psilocybin session, becoming one of the first of many faculty and graduate students to sample the mushroom pill under Learyís guidance.”

By that time, Gregory Bateson was working at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, California. While he was introducing Allen Ginsberg to the drug, a colleague began testing it on Stanford undergraduates. One of these students was Ken Kesey, who would later write One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and was soon to be immortalized by Tom Wolfe as a “Merry Prankster” and LSD missionary in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Meanwhile, Murray, already addicted to amphetamines, continued to flirt with hallucinogens. At Leary’s suggestion, according to a former colleague, he took psilocybin again, this time with Aldous Huxley and Ginsberg. He introduced Morgan to LSD. And in 1961 he spoke at the International Congress of Applied Psychology in Copenhagen, which, thanks to Leary and Huxley’s presence, turned into a virtual psychoactive circus. His talk there, wrote Forrest Robinson, featured “a highly literary rendering of a psilocybin ‘trip’ that he took with Timothy Leary a year earlier. . . . ‘The newspapers described it as the report of a drug-induced vision,’ he wrote [Lewis] Mumford, with obvious delight.”

Not all scientists worked for the CIA. And many did so unwittingly. Nor was this agency the only covert intelligence bureaucracy sponsoring Cold War studies. The U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and other defense agencies financed their own experiments as well, often duplicating each otherís efforts, sometimes at the same institutions. (The Harvard Medical School, for example, conducted LSD research on unwitting subjects for the Department of the Army in 1952-54, even as Hyde continued with similar work at Boston Psychopathic for the CIA.)

And although LSD may have been the most sensational subject, Lee and Shlain make clear that it was far from the only field in which the government was prime mover. Cold War research ran the gamut, from investigations of sleep deprivation to perfecting anthrax delivery systems. It co-opted nearly an entire generation of scholars in the physical, social, and health sciences. This work was so various, so widespread, and so secret that even today it is impossible to grasp its full dimensions.
Among MKULTRA papers that later came to light, Lee and Shlain write, were

CIA documents describing experiments in sensory deprivation, sleep teaching, ESP, subliminal projection, electronic brain stimulation, and many other methods that might have applications for behavior modification. One project was designed to turn people into programmed assassins who would kill on automatic command. Another document mentioned “hypnotically-induced anxieties” and “induced pain as a form of physical and psychological control.” There were repeated references to exotic drugs and biological agents that caused “headache clusters,” uncontrollable twitching or drooling, or a lobotomy-like stupor. Deadly chemicals were concocted for the sole purpose of inducing a heart attack or cancer without leaving a clue as to the actual source of the disease. CIA specialists also studied the effects of magnetic fields, ultrasonic vibration, and other forms of radiant energy on the brain. As one CIA doctor put it, “We lived in a never-never land of ‘eyes only’ memos and unceasing experimentation.”

As university professors and hospital researchers pursued their devil’s bargain with the intelligence community, victims accumulated.

On January 8, 1953, Harold Blauer, a professional tennis player, reportedly died from a massive overdose of a mescaline derivative at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. The drug, say the investigative journalists H. P. Albarelli, Jr., and John Kelly, was administered “as part of a top-secret Army-funded experimental program . . . code named Project Pelican, in which Blauer was used as a guinea pig.” The supervisor of the project was Dr. Paul H. Hoch, director of experimental psychiatry and, according to Albarelli and Kelly, an associate of Harold Abramson’s.

Project Pelican, write Albarelli and Kelly, was part of a larger cooperative venture between the CIA and the army’s Chemical Corps Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland, called MK-NAOMI — reputedly named after Abramsonís assistant, Naomi Busner. The project’s purpose, according to CIA documents, was to develop biological weapons that could be used on “individuals for the purposes of affecting human behavior with the objectives ranging from very temporary minor disablement to more serious and longer incapacitation to death.” At the behest of the Chemical Corps, the New York medical examiner conducted no autopsy of Blauer, kept the army’s name out of its report, and described the death as an accidental overdose.

Eleven months later, the CIA claimed another victim. On November 28, 1953, a Fort Detrick biochemist fell — or was pushedófrom a thirteenth-floor window of New York’s Statler Hotel on Seventh Avenue, falling 170 feet to the sidewalk. He was still alive and trying to talk when the night manager, Armond Pastore, reached him, but died a few minutes later.

Frank Olson, a chemist and joint employee of the CIA and Army Chemical Corps, had worked his entire professional life at Fort Detrick. An expert in germ warfare, during World War II he had designed clothing intended to protect Allied soldiers from possible German biological attacks during the Normandy invasion. In 1949 and 1950, he worked briefly on “Operation Harness,” a joint US-British effort to spray virulent organisms — so-called BW antipersonnel agents — around the Caribbean, decimating untold thousands of plants and animals. At the time of his death, Olson was developing a new, portable, and more lethal form of anthrax that could be put into a small spray can.

By 1953, Olson was acting chief of Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division, which, according to a Michael Ignatieff article in the New York Times Magazine, had become “the center for the development of drugs for use in brainwashing and interrogation.” But he was becoming increasingly disillusioned.

The turning point came during the summer of 1953. Olson had traveled to England and Germany to observe the use of mind-control drugs on collaborators and German SS prisoners considered “expendable.” Some died. While in Europe, according to his son, Eric, Frank Olson also learned that the Americans were deploying Anthrax against enemy troops in Korea. When returning American POWs reported this — the first use of bacterial weapons by the United States in war — authorities in Washington dismissed their claims as products of brainwashing. Returning to America shaken, Olson resolved to quit.

On November 19, Gottlieb met with six MKULTRA personnel, including Olson, at Deep Creek Lodge in rural Maryland. The CIA would claim twenty-two years later that during the retreat, on Gottlieb’s order, his deputy, Robert Lashbrook, spiked the after-dinner Cointreau with LSD. Olson and all but two of the others (one a teetotaler, the other abstaining because of a headcold) drank it. In fact, Eric Olson believes that only his father’s drink was spiked, and that the substance he imbibed was probably not LSD but something stronger. In any case, soon, Olson was experiencing disorientation.

When he came home, his wife, Alice, found him withdrawn, saying repeatedly that he “had made a terrible mistake.” The next day he told his supervisor, Vincent Ruwet, that he wanted to resign from the agency. But officials couldn’t afford to let him leave. He knew too much. Once outside, he could be an acute embarrassment. So Ruwet and Lashbrook took Olson to New York, supposedly to see a psychiatrist. In fact, they brought him to Harold Abramson, who prescribed nembutal and bourbon.

According to the CIA, Ruwet and Lashbrook had earlier taken Olson to see John Mulholland, a magician hired by the CIA to advise on “the delivery of various materials to unwitting subjects” — i.e., on how to spike drinks with drugs or poisons. Olson was suspicious of Mulholland and asked Ruwet, “Whatís behind this? Give me the lowdown. What are they trying to do with me? . . . Just let me disappear.”

That evening, Olson wandered the streets of New York, discarding his wallet and identification cards before returning to the Statler. And the next day, the CIA claims its experts decided Olson must be institutionalized. Yet he seemed to be feeling better. After he and Lashbrook ate a dreary Thanksgiving meal at a Horn & Hardart restaurant, the two men returned to their room at the Statler, which they shared, and Olson called Alice to say he “looked forward to seeing her the next day.”

Around 2:00 a.m. the next morning, Pastore found Olson on the sidewalk. Olson tried to tell Pastore something, but his words were too faint and garbled to be understood. He died before the ambulance arrived. Immediately afterward, Pastore asked the hotel operator if she’d overheard any calls from Room 1081A. Yes, she said, two. In one, someone from the room said, “He’s gone,” and the voice at the other end of the line said, “That’s too bad.”

The CIA hushed up Olson’s death. The medical examiner made no mention of the CIA, did not do an autopsy, and ruled the death a suicide due to depression. The family didn’t believe this story, as Olson had never seemed depressed until after the retreat at Deep Creek Lodge. Yet it would not be until 1975 that they would learn some of the circumstances of his death, and even then not apparently the whole story.

At the request of Frank Olson’s son, Eric, an autopsy was performed in 1994, revealing that Olson had apparently been struck on the left side of the temple and knocked unconscious before going through the window. In 1998, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office reclassified Olson’s death “cause unknown.”

* * *

With Olson’s death, the culture of despair had come full circle. Having experienced what Ellen Herman called “a collapse of faith in the rational appeal and workability of democratic ideology and behavior,” the generation of scholars that emerged from World War II had sought to perfect the tools of social control by which the elite would save democracy. Following the rubrics of positivism, they believed that good and evil are fictions. People aren’t bad, merely sick. By curing them, psychologists can prevent war. All problems can be fixed by the alchemy of the mind sciences.

But a world in which morality has no meaning is one in which eventually everything is permitted. The same narrow focus on value-free science that led Nazi concentration camp doctors to commit atrocities encouraged many of these well-meaning scholars to cross ethical lines. By following a path of moral agnosticism, they reached a dead end. Rather than saving democracy, they created tools for coercion, and many people were hurt.

Murray was a product of these times, a man whose career and ideas embodied the development of his discipline and its role in American culture. Like other leading psychologists of his generation, he was a beneficiary of the Rockefeller Foundation’s efforts to promote psychology in public policy. He was intensely patriotic and served on the Committee for National Morale. He flourished during World War II and he was a star in the OSS.

After the war, Murray’s contributions to personality theory, including the TAT, personnel assessment, and techniques for analyzing foreign leaders and countries, became virtual Cold War institutions. Throughout this undeclared conflict he continued to serve, albeit quietly, America’s defense efforts. And among the services he performed would be the experiments on Kaczynski and his cohort.

Even today, however, neither Murray’s friends, his widow, nor even some historians believe this. Murray, they argue, was a world federalist who, in Herman’s words, was “transformed into a militant pacifist and peace activist after the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Their skepticism is understandable. It is rare when even spouses know of these connections. The CIA never reveals the identity of its “assets.” Often the professor himself doesn’t know the originating source of research monies he receives. And Murray made much of his supposed transformation into ‘peace activist’ following Hiroshima.

Nevertheless, they are mistaken. Hiroshima did not convert Murray to world federalism. Even in 1943, during the same period when he was seeking combat duty in Europe, he wrote in his analysis of Hitler that “there is a great need now rather than later, for some form of World Federation” (Murray’s italics).

Rather, like so many “nervous liberals” of his generation, Murray was both hawk and dove. He resembled his contemporary, Cord Meyer, the war hero and onetime president of United World Federalists, who eventually became a top officer in the CIA. Such ambivalence characterized virtually the entire elite clique of East Coast professionals to which he belonged. Theirs was a world in which everyone knew each other, and many worked for the CIA. Murray was so surrounded by agency people he couldn’t have moved without bumping into one.

In fact, as we have seen, Murray was indeed a Cold War warrior—not, perhaps, as prominent a player as some, but a player nonetheless. He received steady funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, which had served as cover for his trip with Cantril to the Soviet Union for the CIA in 1958, and from the National Institute of Mental Health, also known to be a covert funding conduit. He apparently worked for HumRRo. He served as an adviser on army-sponsored steroid experiments. He helped found Harvard’s Social Relations Department, which had been generously funded by covert intelligence agencies. He served the U.S. Army Surgeon General’s Clinical Psychology Advisory Board and the National Committee for Mental Hygiene with the CIA’s propagator of LSD, Frank Fremont-Smith. Along with Fremont-Smith, Abramson, and Leary, he occupied a spot on the agency’s LSD pyramid.

And in 1959, Murray would cap off a long and distinguished career with the last of a series of studies inspired by his OSS assessments and originally undertaken for the U.S. Navy Department. And Ted Kaczynski would participate.

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Finding the cabin at Deep Creek Lake

Eric Olson
Deep Creek Lake, Maryland

“What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
…
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
…
Quick now, here, now, always —
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)”

— T.S. Eliot
“Little Gidding,” (1943) Four Quartets

Friday, May 8, 1998

I drove west from Frederick on Route 70 in a pouring rain, and continued in slightly better weather on Route 68 through Cumberland, a dilapidated town I hadn’t seen in 37 years, since Nils and I collapsed in exhaustion there on the first day of our bicycle trip to California in the summer of 1961. I kept thinking “Harolds Club or Bust.” Just west of Frostberg I turned south on Route 219.

When I reached the town of “Accident” Maryland I figured I must be getting close. (That town was named for two nineteenth century survey parties who happened—accidentally—to meet up there.) Sure enough, the Deep Creek Bridge, a key landmark for finding the old cabin, was just a few miles beyond.

I stopped at a restaurant a half mile or so from the bridge, and asked where I would find the “Bailey Cabin.” Nobody knew. But then came the suggestion that perhaps I meant the “Railey Cabin.” I had gotten the name from the old typewritten 1953 “Deep Creek Rendezvous” invitation. I checked the name more closely and discovered that the “B” was in fact an “R.” I was crushed to hear someone say “The old Railey cabin was torn down ten years ago,” but I revived fast when the next sentence came. “Go over and meet Mr. Railey, He’s next door drinking at the bar.”

Jim Railey is a small man in his late 70’s who still operates what appears to be a substantial a real estate business. I found him sitting at the bar nursing a Coca Cola. I explained why I was there, and Railey immediately knew the story. “No,” he said, “the old cottage is still there. It’s been added onto quite a bit, but it’s still there. The Stone Tavern that used to stand by the bridge is gone. But the cottage those guys from the CIA used—that’s still there.”

Railey had had only a dim memory of the guys from Washington who had rented the cottage forty-five years earlier. He and his father and brother had laid out the foundation for the place in the early 1940’s, and had finished building it in 1946 when the two brothers got home from the war.

Railey couldn’t say just when he had figured out that the guy who had gone out the window in New York was one of the men who had stayed in his cottage a few days earlier. But at some point he had remembered that a group of government guys had been in his place, and that Olson had been one of them. The cottage itself was only a quarter of mile from where we were sitting and Railey told me how to find it.

The mythical Deep Creek cabin: why had it taken me forty five years to go looking for it? And why had I had to wait until another investigator implied that maybe the place hadn’t been used for the experiment at all? By comparison it had only taken 31 years to find room 1018A in what had been the Statler Hotel. Then another 10 years to exhume the body. Finally I found myself driving toward the place where something had happened on a chilly November night 45 years ago, something that had set a bizarre chain of events in motion.

The stone house is just above the lake at the end of a small dirt road. It is built on a steep slope, and appears considerably larger from the lake side than from the approach. Nobody was home, so I spent half an hour looking in the windows, taking pictures, trying to imagine what might have occurred there those many years ago. I could see a big stone fireplace in the living room of a wing of the house that hadn’t been there in 1953. Just outside was a broad terrace with old lawn chairs facing the lake, and a set of wooden stairs going down 50 feet to the water. The old part of the house was all there was in ’53. In agreement with the 1953 invitation, Railey said the the cottage had had four only bedrooms, each with a double bed. It must have been tight, I thought, when the CIA group of four and the SOD group of five occupied it.

Saturday, May 9, 1998 Point View Inn

I spent the night at the Point View Inn next to the bar where I had met Jim Railey. I was eating breakfast in the dining room overlooking the lake when Railey appeared again with pictures of the Stone Tavern and some of the smaller cottages. He hadn’t found a picture of the old Railey cabin as it looked in 1953, but as we sat drinking coffee he called his brother on his cell phone and Bud Railey promised to send me one.

As we talked about the old cabin Railey looked sad. Meeting me must have been strange for him, but I imagined there was more. It seemed as if, irrationally, a part of Jim Railey believed that what had happened in his cottage, and what it had led to, had been in some way his fault. This bizarre story has the power to make a lot of different people feel that way. I thought for example of Armand Pastore, who is Jim Railey’s contemporary and is clearly pained when he remembers the aspects he witnessed. The only people who seem to be immune to feelings like that are the ones who were actually involved in making it happen.

—Eric Olson

“Why Our Town is Called ‘Accident’?

About the year, 1751, a grant of land was given to Mr. George Deakins by King George II, of England, in payment of a debt. According to the terms, Mr. Deakins was to receive 600 acres of land anywhere in Western Maryland he chose. Mr. Deakins sent out two corps of engineers, each without knowledge of the other grroup, to survey the best land in this section that contained 600 acres.

After the survey, the Engineers returned with their maps of the plots they had surveyed. To their surprise, they discovered that they had surveyed a tract of land starting at the same tall oak tree and returning to the starting point. Mr. Deakins chose this plot of ground and had it patented ‘The Accident Tract’ — Hence, the name of the town.”

History from the back of the business card for:
Accident Garage, Main Street
Accident, Maryland

Allen Fratz, owner

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1. Wormwood

Errol Morris’s Wormwood is a groundbreaking hybrid of non-fictional and fictional storytelling modes—although no matter how you classify it, it’s the year’s towering cinematic achievement. The filmmaker’s second release of the year (after the charming The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography) recounts the tangled saga of Frank Olson, a government biochemist whose mysterious 1953 death out a New York City hotel room window was first deemed a suicide, then the byproduct of a CIA mind-control program, and then something more sinister still. With Olson’s sleuthing son Eric as his guide, Morris immerses himself in this thorny true-crime case, using dramatized sequences—starring a phenomenal Peter Sarsgaard, Molly Parker, Tim Blake Nelson, and Bob Balaban—for his 1953-set sequences, and documentary interviews and material for the rest. Wormwood is assembled as a hallucinatory, psychologically penetrating collage and plays like a pulse-pounding thriller, a damning indictment of institutional malfeasance, and a chilling portrait of both self-destructive obsession and the elusiveness of truth. Simultaneously released as both a 241-minute theatrical movie and a six-part Netflix mini-series, it’s a masterpiece that breathes new life into the documentary form, and further confirms Morris’ peerless greatness. Consequently, it’s our pick for the best film of 2017. Available to stream on Netflix.

PAUL ROBESON JR.
The Paul Robeson Files

The Nation
December 20, 1999

The PBS American Masters documentary on Paul Robeson titled “Here I Stand” surveys the life and work of this great American artist, scholar, and activist. The documentary also examines the question of Robeson’ 1961 suicide attempt.

In the morning of March 27, 196 1, Paul Robeson was found in the bathroom of his Moscow hotel suite after having slashed his wrists with a razor blade following a wild party that had raged there the preceding night. His blood loss was not yet severe, and he recovered rapidly. However, both the raucous party and his “suicide attempt” remain unexplained, and for the past twenty years the US government has withheld documents that I believe hold the answer to the question: Was this a drug induced suicide attempt?

Heavily censored documents I have already received under the Freedom of Information Act confirm that my father was under intense surveillance by the FBI and the CIA in 1960 and 1961, because he was planning to visit China and Cuba, in violation of US passport restrictions. The FBI files also reveal a suspicious concern over my father’s health, beginning in 1955.

A meeting I had in 1998 adds further grounds for suspicion. In June of that year I met Dr. Eric Olson in New York, and we were both struck by the similarities between the cases of our respective fathers. On November 28, 1953, Olson’s father, Dr. Frank Olson, a scientist working with the CIA’s top-secret MK-ULTRA “mind control” program, allegedly “jumped” through the glass of a thirteenth-floor hotel window and fell to his death. CIA documents have confirmed that a week earlier Olson had been surreptitiously drugged with LSD at a high-level CIA meeting. It is expected that a New York grand jury will soon reveal whether it believes Olson was murdered by the CIA because of his qualms about the work he was doing. MK-ULTRA poisoned foreign and domestic “enemies” with LSD to induce mental breakdown and/ or suicide. Olson’s drugging suggested a CIA motive similar to the possible one in my father’s case—concern about the target’s planned course of action.

In this context, the fact that Richard Helms was CIA chief of operations at the time of my father’s 1961 “suicide attempt” has sinister implications. Helms was also responsible for the MK-ULTRA program. In 1967 a former CIA agent to whom I promised anonymity told me in a private conversation that my father was the subject of high-level concern and that Helms and Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles discussed him in a meeting in 1955.

The events leading to my father’s “suicide attempt” began when, alarmed by intense surveillance in London, he departed abruptly for Moscow alone. His intention was to visit Havana at Fidel Castro’s personal invitation and return home to join the civil rights movement. Since the date set by the CIA for the Bay of Pigs invasion fell only four weeks after his arrival in Moscow, the CIA had a strong motive for preventing his travel to Havana.

My father manifested no depressive symptoms at the time, and when my mother and I spoke to him in the hospital soon after his “suicide” attempt, he was lucid and able to recount his experience clearly. The party in his suite had been imposed on him under false pretenses, by people he knew but without the knowledge of his official hosts. By the time he realized this, his suite had been invaded by a variety of anti-Soviet people whose behavior had become so raucous that he locked himself in his bedroom. His description of that setting, I later came to learn, matched the conditions prescribed by the CIA for drugging an unsuspecting victim, and the physical psychological symptoms he experienced matched those of an LSD trip.

My Russian being fluent, I confirmed my father’s story by interviewing his official hosts, his doctors, the organizers of the party, several attendees and a top Soviet official. However, I could not determine whether my father’s blood tests had shown any trace of drugs, whether an official investigation was in progress or why his hosts were unaware of the party. The Soviet official confirmed that known “anti-Soviet people” had attended the party.

By the time I returned to New York in early June, my father appeared to me to be fully recovered. However, when my parents returned to London several weeks later, my father became anxious, and he and my mother returned to Moscow. There his wellbeing was again restored, and in September they once more went back to London, where my father almost immediately suffered a relapse. My mother, acting on the ill-considered advice of a close family friend, allowed a hastily recommended English physician to sign my father into the Priory psychiatric hospital near London.

My father’s records from the Priory, which I obtained only recently, raise the suspicion that he may have been subjected to the CIA’s MK-ULTRA “mind depatterning” technique, which combined massive electroconvulsive therapy with drug therapy. On the day of his admission, my mother was pressured into consenting to ECT, and the treatment began just thirty-six hours later. In May 1963 1 learned that my father had received fifty four ECT treatments, and I arranged his transfer to a clinic in East Berlin.

Certain key CIA documents that have been withheld, in whole or in part, would probably shed additional light on these events. Among the questions to be answered are:

Why was Robeson’s health such a concern to the government, and why is the FBI’s information on it still being withheld?

Was the CIA implicated in my father’s 1961 “suicide attempt”?

Did the CIA, in collusion with the British intelligence service, orchestrate his subjection to “mind depatterning”?

The idea that thirty-eight years after the original events occurred, the release of these documents could endanger national security should be rejected. On the contrary, the release of the information will improve national security by helping to protect the American people from criminal abuse by the intelligence agencies that are supposed to defend them.

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In reburial, Olsons hope to lay saga of father to rest
Family has disputed government claims he committed suicide in ’53; Ceremony planned for today

By Stephanie DesmonBaltimore Sun Staff
Originally published August 9, 2002

FREDERICK — It was here in the Olson family back yard in 1975 that the world first learned the name of a man who, the story went, had been unwittingly drugged with LSD by the Central Intelligence Agency 22 years earlier and then jumped to his death from a 10th-floor hotel room.

The Olsons – among them Eric, the oldest child – called a news conference. Reporters from throughout the country came to the house that Frank Olson had built and gathered around the picnic table to listen.

Reporters heard that family patriarch Frank Olson, ostensibly an Army scientist, had committed suicide in 1953. But that explanation left the family – Eric Olson in particular – with many questions about Frank Olson’s life and death.

Eight years ago, questions unanswered, Frank Olson’s body was exhumed from the Frederick cemetery where it had lain for more than 40 years. Forensic experts are hesitant to assert anything with complete certainty, but they said the death was not a suicide.
Today, Eric Olson and his family will try to put their questions, theories and suspicions to rest as they rebury what is left of Frank Olson in the cemetery plot he shared with his wife. Yesterday, from the same picnic table, Eric Olson, now 57, spoke again to reporters, this time saying he knows how his father was killed, and why – enough answers to allow him to move on.

“I feel satisfied,” said Olson, a Harvard-educated clinical psychologist. “We’re where we want to be – we know what happened.”
What Olson says he knows is this: His father was not a civilian scientist at nearby Fort Detrick, as the family had been told. Instead, he worked for the CIA, running the Special Operations Division at Detrick, which Olson says was the government’s “most secret biological weapons laboratory,” working with materials such as anthrax.

He says the evidence he has gathered over the years shows that Frank Olson didn’t suffer a nervous breakdown, as the family initially was told, and didn’t commit suicide because he had had a negative drug experience, as they learned in the 1970s. Instead, the son says, his father was killed by the CIA because officials there feared he would divulge classified information concerning the United States’ use of biological weapons in Korea.

Two weeks after that news conference in 1975, the Olson family was invited to the White House for a formal apology from President Gerald R. Ford. “Actually, it was not at all clear exactly what it was that the president and the CIA director were apologizing for,” Olson recalled yesterday. After the family agreed not to sue the CIA, it was awarded a $750,000 settlement. They had been told theirs was a case they could not win.

Now the family has learned that the Ford administration was keeping information from the family, concerned that family members would ask questions about the scientist’s work that the government was unprepared to answer. Among those who advocated keeping quiet were Dick Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, now the vice president and defense secretary, the Olsons learned from memos and other papers received last year from the Gerald R. Ford Library.

“Most of it is documented now,” said Philadelphia lawyer David Rudovsky, who was a roommate of Eric Olson’s in the 1970s and has assisted him with the case over the years. “It’s more than just some crazy paranoid speculation.”
“It’s not an easy theory to wrap your mind around,” concedes Nils Olson, 53, Eric Olson’s brother.

Little is left of the body the Olsons exhumed in 1994. When the casket was opened that day – it had been closed during the funeral years before because the family had been told Frank Olson’s body was too disfigured from his fall – Eric Olson recognized his father. His face was largely intact, lacking the cuts that would have resulted if he had broken through a plate-glass window to jump.

Something else they say they have learned: Information about the murder of Frank Olson, as the family calls it, is included in the assassination curriculum of the Israeli Mossad – Israel’s intelligence agency – because it is considered a successful instance of disguising a murder as a suicide.

When Frank Olson is buried again today, only bones will be returned to the ground – the tissue has been removed for study. The bones have been sitting for years in a locked file cabinet in the George Washington University office of James E. Starrs, the professor of law and forensic sciences who determined that the death was not a suicide.

Yesterday’s news conference lasted nearly two hours as members of Eric Olson’s family, including his brother, son and nieces, read through a statement, more than 20 pages long, before answering questions. Eric Olson lives in his childhood home, the place he lived when he was 9 years old and learned of his father’s death.

Yesterday, Eric Olson thanked people who have long listened to his story and helped him work through the details: the filmmaker who made a German documentary on the subject, the mechanic who has kept his Volvo running, the friend who catered lunch.

Starrs listened to Eric Olson talk yesterday about putting his father’s death in the past. Starrs is not sure that Olson will be able to do so.
“I think people say these things in the hope they’ll have sleep-filled nights again,” Starrs said.

“What I really respect about Eric is the purity of his pursuit,” brother Nils Olson, a dentist who lives in Frederick, said afterward. “It hasn’t been to pursue a fixed agenda. It’s really been the pursuit of truth.” Nils Olson sometimes worried that they might learn something ugly about their father – for example, that he had been a traitor to his government. Eric, though, was undeterred, whatever the outcome.

“Eric has given over a large bulk of his life to this,” Nils Olson said. “To be able to now invest energy back into his professional career – hopefully, it’s not too late; he is in his late 50s. He is extremely bright, and he has a lot to offer the field of psychology.

“I believe he can put it to rest.”

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Unpublished letter to the editor, The New Yorker, in response to Louis Menand’s “Brainwashed: Where the ‘Manchurian Candidate’ came from.”

September 12, 2003
To the editor, The New Yorker

In his essay “Brainwashed: Where the ‘Manchurian Candidate’ came from” Louis Menand suggests that the charge made by brainwashed American pilots that the US had engaged in germ warfare during the Korean War was “untrue but widely believed in many countries.” Menand implies that this controversial issue is far more settled than is in fact the case.

A new documentary film, “Code Name Artichoke” (produced this year by German public television and widely shown internationally and in the US on WorldLink TV) on the death of my father, Dr. Frank Olson, revisits this question and presents new evidence.

In the year before his death in 1953 my father, a biochemist, was acting chief of the Special Operations Division (essentially an off-campus CIA BW lab) at the Army’s center for biological warfare at Camp Detrick, Maryland. This position put him on the boundary between biological warfare and interrogation research, precisely the strange boundary zone evoked in the term “germ warfare confessions.” The conventional wisdom alleges that in November 1953 he threw himself out of a 13th floor window of the Statler Hotel in New York (now the Hotel Pennsylvania) after having himself been drugged with LSD by the CIA in a mind control experiment. This version of events comprises the core chapter of John Marks’ 1979 book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. (Times Books)

“Code Name Artichoke” shows that my father became convinced that the US was using biological weapons in Korea, at least on an experimental basis. The film juxtaposes footage of an American pilot making these claims with footage in which this same serviceman subsequently recants his “germ warfare confession.” The question as to which of these statements is the product of indoctrination is thereby starkly posed, with the implication that the notion of brainwashing was, among other things, a powerful tool for psychological discrediting.

Family Statement on the Murder of Frank Olson

Forty-one years ago—on June 26, 1961—Nils (then twelve years old) and Eric (then sixteen) set out on our bicycles from this house and began cycling to California.

A bit like Lewis and Clark, we had very little idea what we would encounter during our trip West. During the six and a half weeks of our journey we were propelled by a powerful and simple idea, which boiled down to the notion “just keep peddling.” We knew that Route 40, the old National Pike just a few hundred yards from here at the end of the lane, went all the way to the West Coast. Our motto was “Harolds Club or Bust.” All you had to do was just keep going and follow the road. Eventually you would come to San Francisco.

Eight years earlier our father had died—vanished really—and it has taken all the years since then to figure out what happened to him. Our search for the truth about what happened to our father has been a lot like that bike trip to California. All one had to do was to keep following the thread represented by his disappearance. Eventually one would come to the answer.

In both cases one reached the goal by small continuous increments of motion along a single strand. Nevertheless, the final destination did not look anything like the place from which one started out. Little by little one entered unknown terrain. But the destination, whether it was San Francisco or the truth about what happened to Frank Olson, was still on the same map. Incredible as it sometimes seemed, in both cases, the place one finally got to was still part of America.

Today we want want to try to give you some idea of what this journey has been like, and tell you something about the unfamiliar American territory we have discovered.

Our purpose in inviting you here today is to explain why—49 years after his death, 27 years after the government claimed to have told us the truth about his death, and 8 years after we had his body exhumed and a forensic investigation performed—we are going to rebury our father’s remains tomorrow.

The reason we have waited so long to do this is that we wanted to be certain that when we reburied our father’s remains we would not be reburying the truth at the same time.

The gist of what we want to say can be compressed into three headlines:

1. The death of Frank Olson on November 28, 1953 was a murder, not a suicide.

2. This is not an LSD drug-experiment story, as it was represented in 1975. This is a biological warfare story. Frank Olson did not die because he was an experimental guinea pig who experienced a “bad trip.” He died because of concern that he would divulge information concerning a highly classified CIA interrogation program called “ARTICHOKE” in the early 1950’s, and concerning the use of biological weapons by the United States in the Korean War.

3. The truth concerning the death of Frank Olson was concealed from the Olson family as well as from the public in 1953. In 1975 a cover story regarding Frank Olson’s death was disseminated. At the same time a renewed coverup of the truth concerning this story was being carried out at the highest levels of government, including the White House. The new coverup involved the participation of persons serving in the current Administration.

We will make available materials to amplify all these points, and provide copies of a definitive new one-hour documentary film on the Frank Olson case called “Code Name ARTICHOKE” that will air on public TV in Germany (the ARD network) next week, on Monday, August 12.

I. “Return to the beginning”

Now, to back up and approach all this a bit more slowly:

There is a passage in “The Four Quartets” where the poet T.S. Eliot writes:

… the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

This is a moment like that, a moment when the circle closes. A moment of returning—this time with knowledge—to the beginning.

Twenty-seven years ago, on July 10, 1975, our family sat at this same picnic table in this same backyard, to hold a press conference. At that time the family consisted of our mother Alice, then 59 years old, Eric, 30, our sister Lisa, 29, and Nils, 26.

Today Eric is 57. Nils is 53. Eric’s son Stephan is 12. Nils’ daughter Lauren is 19. His daughter Kristin is 17. Lisa died in an airplane crash in 1978. Our mother passed away in 1993.

That day in July 1975 we sat at this table and read a family statement. This was how it looked that day.(“Backyard press conference,” poster 3).

A month earlier, on June 11, 1975, an article had appeared on the front page of the Washington Post. The article contained stunning news about our father, but it did not mention his name. The purpose of our press conference in 1975 was to say that the unidentified man referred to in that article was Frank Olson.

Twenty-two years earlier, in the early morning of November 28, 1953, our father died in what we were told was an “accident.” For those twenty-two years between 1953 and 1975 we knew nothing about how he died or why. In 1953 we had been told only that he had had “an accident” in a New York hotel room and had “fallen or jumped” out the window.

Then followed 22 years of inky darkness.

II. “Suicide Revealed”

Ours was a family that tried its best to be normal in the 1950’s way. But in fact this was a family haunted by fear, shame, uncertainty, and insecurity. It was a family that had, in effect, been terrorized. Two decades passed.

Then on June 11, 1975, out of nowhere, like a message in a bottle suddenly washed ashore by distant storms (in this instance the storms were Vietnam and Watergate), came a cryptic bit of news.

Under the headline “Suicide Revealed” on the front page of the Washington Post we read the following paragraphs:

A civilian employee of the Department of the Army unwittingly took LSD as part of a Central Intelligence Agency test, then jumped 10 floors to his death less than a week later, according to the Rockefeller commission report released yesterday.

The man was given the drug while attending a meeting with CIA personnel working on a test project that involved the administration of mind-bending drugs to unsuspecting Americans and the testing of new listening devices by eavesdropping on citizens who were unaware they were being overheard.

“This individual was not made aware he had been given LSD until about 20 minutes after it had been administered,” the commission said. “He developed serious side effects and was sent to New York with a CIA escort for psychiatric treatment. Several days later, he jumped from a tenth-floor window of his room and died as a result.”

The CIA’s general counsel ruled that the death resulted from “circumstances arising out of an experiment undertaken in the course of his official duties for the United States government.” His family, thus, was eligible for death benefits. And two CIA employees were “reprimanded” by the director.

The man identified as an “army scientist” turned out to be Frank Olson. But nobody bothered to notify our family that this story was being released. Not the Rockefeller Commission, not the CIA, not the White House.

It was as if a long-lost MIA had at last been found and identified, but his family were not notified.

This horrendous omission turns out to be a key to the whole story. It indicates that the “truth” was being suppressed even as it was coming to light. In fact the headline “Suicide Revealed” was triply ironic. First the death was not a suicide. Second it was not “revealed”: the name was not given. Third, we would later learn that the subject of the experiment was not an “Army scientist.”

We recognized our father in this story only by the fit of the details: the man was a “scientist,” the year was “1953,” the fall was from a “tenth floor window.”

A month later (July 10) we held a press conference, right here, to provide the name—“Frank Olson”—that the story had lacked up to then.

At that point the government wasted no time in getting in touch.

Less than two weeks later (July 23) we were sitting in the Oval Office receiving an official apology from Gerald Ford. And five days after that (July 28) we were having lunch with CIA Director William Colby in the Director’s 7th floor office at Langley, receiving an apology from the CIA, along with what we were told was the complete CIA file on our father’s death.

The contrast between the failure of the government to notify us when the anonymous story about our father was being released, and the scurrying around at the highest levels to apologize to us once we identified ourselves, could not have been more stark.

This was another sign that something was still amiss. Ask yourself when you last remember an American President calling a family to the Oval Office to receive an apology for the unintended effects of a United States government policy.

Actually it was not at all clear exactly what it was that the President and the CIA Director were apologizing for.

Was it for the reckless CIA LSD drugging at Deep Creek Lake?

Was it for the nonchalant medical treatment by the non-psychiatrist to whom Frank Olson was subsequently taken?

Was it for keeping the allegedly psychotic Frank Olson in a hotel rather than a hospital?

Was it for the fact that his CIA escort was asleep in the next bed when Frank Olson “fell or jumped” out the window?

Was it for not telling the truth to his family in 1953?

Or was it for not notifying the Olson family when this story was finally emerging twenty-two years later, in 1975?

The President assured us that the White House would support our efforts to obtain justice. Almost immediately we were advised by White House attorneys that a law suit would be risky, as the law was not on our side. Accordingly the government attorneys strongly recommended that we pursue a settlement via a Private Bill in Congress, which they said the White House would support.

In 1976 our family received a financial settlement from Congress for far less than the White House, CIA Director George Bush, the Justice Department, the Labor Department, and the Treasury Department had recommended. A single Congressman had decided to oppose the settlement, so it was enacted in drastically reduced form.

Having already received the document package from the CIA, the matter was now officially over. We signed an agreement saying that all our claims against the United States government in the death of Frank Olson were settled.

By that time the name “Frank Olson” had started to achieve the almost mythical status it subsequently acquired. “Frank Olson” became a symbol for the effects of careless human experimentation in general and reckless CIA behavior in particular. (“Psychology Today,” poster 5.)

The “fell or jumped” scenario at the window never really made sense. But nobody in the 1970’s spent much time thinking about how our father actually died. In fact the 1970’s version of the Frank Olson story was a story that everyone could love.

Journalists could pride themselves on having reported a story of horrendous governmental wrong-doing that now had a human face. Congressional investigators and legislators could pride themselves on their dutiful governmental housecleaning in the aftermath of Watergate. The White House could pride themselves on having acted responsibly when the truth came to light. The public could revel in wild stories of government-sponsored drug experiments. And the CIA itself could relax, knowing that behind the popular notion of buffoon-like behaviour of out-of-control-agents the real story had not even been touched.

Everyone seemed to get high on the Frank Olson story. In the midst of all this hubbub what nobody seemed to notice was that the story of Frank Olson’s death hadn’t changed at all.

In 1953 the story was that Frank Olson “fell or jumped” out the window due to job-related stress. The Olson children grew up saying that our father died of a “fatal nervous breakdown.”

In 1975 the story was still that Frank Olson “fell or jumped” out the window. Only now the reason was that he had been drugged with LSD by the CIA eight days earlier.

In both cases the claim was that nobody saw anything even though a CIA official allegedly acting as an escort and protector was sleeping in the next bed when Frank Olson “fell or jumped” out the window of a very small room.

Nobody saw anything in 1953. In the 1975 version nobody saw anything either (the only new element was the unwitting administration of LSD), and nobody notified the Olson family that a new story was coming out. In 1953 the Olson family was assured by the government within three days of Frank Olson’s death that the family would receive government employee’s compensation. In 1975 after the family press conference the Olson family was immediately assured by the President that the government would provide more restitution.

Despite the apparent narrative shift, the continuity in the structure of the story over two decades could scarcely have been more complete.

The story didn’t make any sense in 1953, and it didn’t make any more sense in 1975. But the sensational notion of LSD administered by the CIA served wonderfully to conceal this gap.

Frank Olson didn’t jump out the window (even in physical terms that would have been virtually impossible), and he certainly didn’t fall out. He was pushed out. Or, to use the words of CIA terminology that we would later discover, he was “dropped.”

But if there was foul play in the death of Frank Olson what was the motive? Why would the government murder an “Army scientist” who had been unwittingly drugged with LSD?

At that point the gap concerning what happened at the window turned into a chasm concerning the motive for the whole affair.

The story of Frank Olson’s death, illuminated for a moment with the anonymous news from the Rockefeller Report, seemed to return to inky darkness.

III. A story no one could love

Over the 27 years that have elapsed since 1975 light has been cast on all this from many directions, and the real story of Frank Olson’s death has gradually taken shape.

The real story is not merely a story that no one could love. The real story is a story that no one wanted to know. This made it easy to peddle the ludicrous fairy tale cover story in 1975, a story that in hindsight resembles “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

The real story is not a simple or short one, and we will not be able to tell all of it in detail in this statement. Instead we will fast forward to key the key moments that have, piece by piece, eviscerated the 1975 story and left a very different one in its place. The real story is not one in which anyone will take pleasure. Uncovering this story has been a decades-long agony for us as well.

The real story is like a murder mystery in which the tale begins with a body that floats to the surface of a murky lake. The mystery of the death can’t be solved until that body is reinserted into the sprawling network of crime, corruption, and power that motivated the murder.

In Eric’s quest for truth two quotes have been key:

One came from CBS correspondent Anthony Mason in 1994: “Eric,” Mason said, “you are going to get to the bottom of this, but it is going to be a false bottom.”

That is no longer the situation, but getting to a solid bottom has required a very long descent.

The second quote comes from Tommy Worsley, the genius Volvo mechanic who kept Eric’s car running during the long years of digging. Tommy said:

“Eric, you need to tell this story, because it will help a lot of people connect a lot of other dots in other stories that have nothing to do with this one.”

In that spirit, we will try here to convey the path we followed that led, finally, to a very different story of how, and why, Frank Olson died. We want to emphasize at the outset, however, that our purpose was never to prove that Frank Olson was murdered. Our purpose was to find out what had happened, and to arrive at a story—whatever that story might be—that made sense. In the course of a long search not a single shred of evidence has corroborated the government’s story, which, it is important to remember, was never really a story at all. The Emperor was naked from the start.

Problems with the conventional story
(The Colby documents)

In the years after the case was settled we had had time to grapple more carefully with the confusing stack of documents we had received from William Colby. The more we tried to absorb these documents the more they seemed to dissolve in ambiguity in front of our eyes. The story told by the government simply did not hold up to scrutiny.

Taken as a whole, the file is a jumble of deletions, conflicting statements, unintelligible passages and such unexplained terms as the “Artichoke Committee” and “Project Bluebird” that tend to confuse more than enlighten.

But the real problem was that the Colby documents seemed to be pointing to a story that they were not telling—a story quite at odds with the spin that had already been placed on the story by the initial account in the Rockefeller Commission Report.

For example, one of the reports submitted by the doctor (an allergist, as it turned out) to whom our father was taken in New York, states that “an experiment had been done to trap” Frank Olson.

We now know that this story begins long before the meeting at Deep Creek Lake November 1953 where the CIA conducted what it later called a “drug experiment.” It begins with concerns about Frank Olson’s commitment to CIA programs, especially after he witnessed terminal interrogations in Germany in the summer of 1953. The aim of the drugging at Deep Creek was apparently to assess the extent of Frank Olson’s disaffection and alienation, given the depth of his ethical qualms.

The CIA official (Sidney Gottlieb) who was reprimanded by the Agency for the drugging of Frank Olson was also personally involved in CIA attempts to assassinate Patrice Lumumba and other national leaders.

In another place the Colby documents refer to something called “the Schwab activity” at Frank Olson’s division at Detrick as being arguably “un-American.” The documents imply that issues pertaining to this activity were somehow involved in Frank Olson’s death.

In these documents the overall context for Frank Olson’s death is related not to the infamous MK-ULTRA program for mind and behavior control, as is generally assumed. The Colby documents locate Olson’s death in the context of a CIA operation called ARTICHOKE. However most of the passages pertaining to ARTICHOKE in the documents provided to the Olson family have been carefully deleted.

Operation ARTICHOKE was a CIA program that preceded MK-ULTRA. ARTICHOKE involved the development of special, extreme methods of interrogation. Officials responsible for the ARTICHOKE program were very concerned with the problem of disposing of “blown agents” and with the task of finding a way to produce amnesia in operatives who had seen too much and could no longer be relied upon.

The Colby documents state, as does William Colby in his 1978 autobiography, that Frank Olson was not an “Army scientist,” but, rather, a “CIA employee,” a “CIA officer.”

One of the most confusing aspects of the story of what happened to Frank Olson is the inconsistency in the accounts given by the key witness, CIA employee Dr. Robert Lashbrook, who was allegedly asleep in next bed in the same small hotel room at the time Frank Olson went out the window (“Psychology Today,” poster 5).

In the immediate aftermath of Olson’s death in 1953 Lashbrook told Alice Olson that he had seen her husband plunge through the hotel window. But later Lashbrook said that he had been awakened from sleep by the sound of crashing glass, and only upon noticing that the bed next to his was empty did he realize that his roommate had gone out the window. In 1995 we were contacted by Dr. Robert Gibson.

In 1953 Dr. Gibson was the admitting psychiatrist at the hospital near Washington to which Frank Olson was allegedly to have been taken after returning from New York City. Subsequently Dr. Gibson went on to a distinguished career in psychiatry, becoming President of the American Psychiatric Association, and Director of Sheppard Pratt Hospital in Baltimore.

Dr. Gibson reported to us the statement that had been made to him by the CIA official who contacted him on the morning of Frank Olson’s death—a statement identical to one Robert Lashbrook made to Alice Olson, but in direct contradiction to the story told in the Colby documents.

In the early morning of November 28, the CIA official who had shared the hotel room with Frank Olson did not tell Dr. Gibson that he was awakened by the sound of crashing glass when his roommate went through the window. Instead, Dr. Gibson was told that Frank Olson’s CIA escort had awakened to see Olson standing in the middle of the room. The witness had tried to speak to Olson, and had then watched as Olson plunged through the window on a dead run.

This account appears to have been the first draft of a cover story that was subsequently revised to the form in which it was eventually disseminated. In that version of the story nobody saw anything.

But if nobody saw nuthin, somebody did hear something. Immediately after the death a call was placed from Frank Olson’s hotel room. The call was overheard by the hotel switchboard operator and reported immediately to the night manager (Armand Pastore). The call consisted of only two sentences. According to the operator the person in the room had said:

“Well he’s gone.”

The person on the other end replied:

“That’s too bad.”

Then they both hung up.

In various versions of Lashbrook’s accounts of what occurred in room 1018A the window was either open or else it was closed; the blind was either drawn and pushed through the window when Frank Olson plunged through the window or else it snapped up and spun around the spindle when it was hit; and Lashbrook either did nor did not see what happened.

Digging up the body
(Exhumation and forensic investigation)

The doubts raised by the incoherent Colby documents, and by the many other anomalies in the story, led us to have Frank Olson’s body exhumed and a forensic investigation performed. This we did in 1994.

After his death the Olson family was told that Frank Olson’s body was too disfigured to be seen. For this reason at the funeral in 1953 Frank Olson’s casket was closed. The Olson family never saw his body after he left for New York four days earlier. This contributed to a feeling that Frank Olson had not so much died as disappeared.

When the casket was opened in 1994 Frank Olson’s upper body was not disfigured as the New York Medical Examiner’s Report had claimed in 1953. In fact Frank Olson was recognizable after forty-one years in the grave.

The forensic investigation in 1994 confirmed the family’s worst suspicions. In fact the results of this investigation led the principal forensic investigator, who is with us today, to conclude that the overwhelming probability was that Frank Olson’s death was not a suicide but a homicide.

In November of 1994 Professor Starrs and his team presented the initial findings of their forensic investigation at a press conference. “When you pull on the Frank Olson case,” Professor Starrs said then, “you get the feeling that something very big is pulling back.”

In 1994 nobody had a clear idea of what that big something might be.

The question of motive
(Why would the government murder Frank Olson?)

As indications accumulated that Frank Olson had been murdered the question of motive became more pressing. Why would the government murder an “Army scientist” simply because he had been used as an unwitting guinea pig in a drug experiment? Once again, as we went down the path suggested by these questions we discovered that all the assumptions on which they were based were incorrect.

First, as indicated earlier, we discovered that Frank Olson was not simply an “Army scientist.” He was a “CIA officer” associated with projects so heavily guarded that the term “top secret” gives only scant indication of their sensitivity. Actually they are better described as State Secrets.

Special Operations Division at Detrick

In 1952 Frank Olson was acting chief of the Special Operations Division at Detrick; at the time of his death in 1953 he was SOD’s director of planning and evaluations. The Special Operations Divison at Detrick was the government’s most secret biological weapons laboratory. In fact the SO Division was only physically located at Detrick. In essence the SO Division was an off-campus CIA biological warfare laboratory, doing work on bacteriological agents for use in covert operations.

The Rockefeller Commission’s account of the suicide of an “Army scientist” not only neglected to add the man’s name and his CIA affiliation; it omitted any reference to his high position in the country’s most secret biological weapons laboratory.

When this information is added to the story, and when one obtains some idea of what sorts of projects were being pursued at the SO Division, then the overall picture of the death of Frank Olson changes entirely. (“Dangerous intersection,” poster 6.)

Projects at the Special Operations Division involved or related to the following activities:

• Assassinations materials research (e.g. the materials used in the CIA’s attempts to assassination Lumumba in the Congo and Castro in Cuba)

• Biological warfare materials for use in covert operations

• Biological warfare experiments in populated areas

• Terminal interrogations

• Collaboration with former Nazi scientists

• LSD mind-control research

• U.S. employment of biological weapons in the Korean War.

Security issues

As our understanding of Frank Olson’s work grew, our attention was again drawn back to the Colby documents, and we became aware of another gaping hole in the story we had been given. Considering the ultra-secrecy and strategic importance of the work in which Frank Olson was engaged at the time of his death it is nothing less than astounding that among the documents we had been given by the CIA in 1975, which we were told was the complete file, there is no mention at all of any security issues.

Even within the parameters of the CIA’s own story this could not have been true. Here was a top government scientist, engaged in some of the most secret projects at the height of the Cold War. According to the CIA’s account, this scientist had now been used as an unwitting guinea pig in an LSD experiment. He reacts badly to the drug, becomes unstable, and is taken to New York for treatment. But he is not taken to a hospital, or even a safe house. He is kept in a hotel. Two days before his death he allegedly leaves his room in the middle of the night, wanders the streets alone, throws away wallet, including all of his money and his identification.

At no point do the documents describing this weird scenario mention a security problem.

But if the Colby documents fail to discuss security issues, other internal documents that we obtained do mention this issue. One document, found in Frank Olson’s personnel file at Detrick, specifically mentions “fear of a security violation” after Olson’s trip to Europe in the summer of 1953, just four months before his death.

The New York District Attorney

From every direction the story of Frank Olson’s death seemed only to become more dark as we were able to fill in more of the background and context. First, the CIA documents proved unconvincing. Second, the forensic investigation added fuel to the fires of our suspicions. And third, the motive for murder turned out to be far more substantial than we had dared to imagine.

By 1996 our suspicions had reached an intolerable threshold. We decided to turn for assistance to the only governmental institution that might be able to help us. Because the death occurred in New York we presented a memorandum to the New York District Attorney’s Office outlining the many reasons for believing that the death of Frank Olson was a murder. We asked the DA’s office to reopen the case. (Copies of this memorandum are available.) This memorandum proved persuasive. In 1996 the New York District Attorney opened a homicide investigation into the death of Frank Olson.

A “perfect murder”

One of the outcomes of the The New York District Attorney’s investigation has been confirmation of an allegation that had earlier seemed too extreme to be taken seriously. The New York DA was informed that for many years the murder of Frank Olson was taught as a case of “perfect murder” at the assassination training unit of the Israeli Mossad outside Tel Aviv. The Frank Olson case was included in the Mossad’s assassination curriculum due to the success with which a murder had been disguised as a suicide.

The New York District Attorney was in fact able to locate a source in Israel with close ties to Israeli intelligence which was able to confirm this allegation. In 2000 this source traveled to the United States to speak with the Assistant District Attorney assigned to the case, and also to Eric Olson. Eric was told directly by the New York DA’s source that the case of Frank Olson’s death has been taught in Israel as a case of “perfect murder.”

An alternative story of the death of Frank Olson
(Terminal interrogations and biological weapons in the Korean War)

Gradually a completely new story of the death of Frank Olson was emerging, one that bore very little resemblance to the one that had long-since become the conventional wisdom on this issue. But the question of motive remained a mystery. Eventually that piece of the puzzle appeared as well.

A little over a year ago we were contacted by one of our father’s oldest friends and closest colleagues at Detrick. Together with a small group of other scientists this colleague (Norman Cournoyer) and Frank Olson had designed the protective clothing for the invasion of Normandy during World War II.

Cournoyer told us that a crucial element had been omitted from published accounts of the Olson case. That element was the Korean War.

Cournoyer added three crucial elements to the story:

1. In the late 1940’s Frank Olson joined the CIA where he specialized in the field of “information retrieval.” This was the ARTICHOKE program, which we already knew was the operational context in which Frank Olson was working.

2. In the course of this work in information retrieval Frank Olson made numerous trips to Europe, during which he observed interrogations of persons (Soviet prisoners, former Nazis, and others) which involved the combined application of electro-shock, drugs, and torture. These interrogations sometimes led to the deaths of the subjects being interrogated.

3. Through the “information retrieval” work Frank Olson learned that in fact—despite vehement denials by the American government—the United States was using biological weapons, including anthrax, in the Korean War.

This information from Cournoyer fit well with what we already knew and with what we would soon learn. In documents from the Gerald Ford Library we were about to discover the extreme concern in the 1975 White House that “highly classified national security information” was at stake in the death of Frank Olson.

This information also fits closely with what Alice Olson had repeatedly said about her husband’s state of mind in the period prior to his death. Alice Olson had always insisted that Frank had been very worried that the United States may have been employing biological weapons in Korea. But she did not know whether her husband knew the truth about this or not, or even whether he would have been in a position to know.

This information also fits the fact that in the summer of 1953, after returning from a trip to Europe, Frank Olson underwent a moral crisis concerning his work. This moral crisis was noticed by his wife, by his close friends, as well as by relatives. This crisis occurred, it is important to emphasize, several months prior to the LSD drugging at Deep Creek Lake.

Frank Olson’s moral crisis culminated in his decision to quit his job during the weekend following the drugging, a fact which, again, is not mentioned in the Colby documents. Frank Olson went to work on a Monday morning and resigned from his job. By late Friday night he was dead.

For fifty years the United States has continued to deny that this country has used biological weapons in combat. As chief of the government’s most secret biological lab in the early 1950’s Frank Olson’s position concerning these allegations could not have been discredited.

An interview with Cournoyer elaborating these points appears in the new German documentary film, “Code Name ARTICHOKE.”

Technique of a concealed murder
(The CIA assassination manual)

The story of Frank Olson’s death now held two of the three elements that are required to be present to postulate a murder: motive, means, and opportunity. The days in the New York hotel room, away from family and community, had certainly offered an opportunity for the crime. What we had discovered about the scale of national security secrets to which Frank Olson had access, combined with Frank’s growing moral doubts, held a plausible motive. However, we were still unable to conceptualize a means for the execution of the crime. That too was about to change.

In 1997 we obtained a copy of the CIA’s 1953 assassination manual and were stunned to discover its pertinence to the questions that haunted us. The scenario presented in that manual dovetails not only with what we had learned from the forensic investigation, but also with what we had been told regarding the teaching of the Frank Olson case by the Mossad’s assassination training unit in Israel.

The CIA’s own assassination manual contains precise instructions for the technique of disguising a murder as a suicide or an accident through perpetrating what the manual calls a “contrived accident.”

The sort of “contrived accident” that the manual recommends for the purpose of disguising a murder as a suicide is a fall from a high window or roof onto a hard surface.

As with the original Washington Post story that had led us in 1975 to recognize our father—even though he was not named—the fit between what the manual says about this technique and what is known about Frank Olson’s death is stunningly precise. This fit led the principal forensic investigator who had exhumed our father’s body to say that the assassination manual “fits the death of Frank Olson like the fingers of a glove.” (“CIA assassination manual found,” poster 7.)

The assistant district attorney handling the homicide investigation in New York put it even more strongly. After reading the assassination manual the Assistant District Attorney said,

The assassination manual reads like a script for the murder of Frank Olson.… The only question is which came first, the manual or the murder. Was the manual based on the murder or was the murder carried out according to the manual? (“Saracco reads the manual,” poster 8.)

Here are some passages from the CIA’s own manual on the technique of disguising a murder through engineering a “contrived accident”:

Assassination is a term thought to be derived from “Hashish,” a drug similar to marijuana, said to have been used by Hasan-Dan-Sabah to induce motivation in his followers…

Assassination is an extreme measure not normally used in clandestine operations.…

No assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded. Consequently, the decision to employ this technique must nearly always be reached in the field, at the area where the act will take place. Decision and instructions should be confined to an absolute minimum of persons. Ideally, only one person will be involved. No report may be made…

TECHNIQUES

The essential point of assassination is the death of the subject.

Techniques may be considered as follows:

1. Manual

It is possible to kill a man with bare hands, but very few are skillful enough to do it well…

2. Accidents

For secret assassination, either simple [where the subject is unaware of the danger he is in] or chase [where the subject is aware of the danger but unguarded], the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated.

The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve… If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the “horrified witness”, no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary. In chase cases it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him. Care is required to insure that no wound or condition not attributable to the fall is discernible after death.

If the subject’s personal habits make it feasible, alcohol may be used [2 words excised] to prepare him for a contrived accident of any kind.

3. Drugs

In all types of assassination except terroristic, drugs can be very effective. If the assassin is trained as a doctor or nurse and the subject is under medical care, this is an easy and rare method.

5. Blunt weapons

Blows should be directed to the temple, the area just below and behind the ear, and the lower, rear portion of the skull.

It was on Frank Olson’s temple, above his left eye, that the forensic team discovered a suspicious hematoma which they concluded must have come from a blow to Frank Olson’s head before he went out the window. The forensic team discovered this hematoma, and concluded it must have come from a blow to the head in the room, a full three years before we found the CIA’s assassination manual. (“CIA assassination manual found,” poster 7.)

In the end it was impossible not to read the CIA’s assassination manual as anything but a blueprint for the murder of Frank Olson. Indeed the principal forensic investigator who had exhumed the body viewed it in exactly that way. Hard as it was to imagine that the government would murder an American citizen and then disguise that murder, first as a suicide and then as a reaction to an LSD overdose, we now felt compelled by the overwhelming weight of the evidence to accept this scenario as the only plausible account of this whole complex affair.

Clinching the story
(Documents from the 1975 Ford White House)

A long and grueling journey toward understanding seemed to be coming to an end. We now were able to clearly formulate a motive, a means, and an opportunity for the murder of Frank Olson, and to provide an account of the death that was more convincing than anything we had been told by the government. The glaring gap that still remained pertained not to what had happened in 1953 but to what had happened in 1975.

Certainly if the real story to which we were being led was correct, then the government would have been forced into a very awkward position when the Olson family suddenly attached a name to the anonymous story of an “Army scientist” that the Rockefeller Commission had divulged. This would explain why the goverment had reacted so quickly to our press conference in July of 1975, immediately inviting us to meet the President in the Oval Office of the White House to receive an official apology.

But was the truth that was buried in the death of Frank Olson so big that even the President would be enlisted to maintain the secret? Certainly the virtuoso job of disinformational engineering that had been applied to the whole affair seemed to suggest that no resources would be spared to keep the truth secret. But now, having reached what we were now convinced was the truth about the murder, how could we ever learn the truth about the renewal of the coverup in 1975?

That gap in our understanding—which seemed even wider than the one that had once surrounded the death itself—was about to be closed in the most astounding way.

In 2001 we obtained documents from the Gerald Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan pertaining to the handling of our case by the Ford White House in 1975. These documents include intra-office memoranda by senior White House staff members and attorneys. Copies of these documents are available. (“The White House reacts,” poster 9.)

These documents show that the White House was extremely alarmed that the Olson family had recognized the unnamed “Army scientist” as Frank Olson, and was concerned that the family was demanding the truth concerning Olson’s death. Already on July 11, 1975—just one day after our press conference—the White House was outlining a strategy to handle our case, a strategy that would ensure that we did not request pertinent information regarding what had actually happened to Frank Olson.

In 1975 the White House advised us that they were concerned that if we went to court we might lose and not obtain what the White House regarded as appropriate compensation.

But the memoranda we obtained show that the real concern at the White House was that if we went to court we it might become necessary to disclose “highly classified information.” The memos show that the government would refuse to disclose such information. This would mean that the government would have no defense at all against claims for information that the Olson family might legitimately make.

The invitation to our family to meet with President Gerald Ford was part of this strategy. Unbeknownst to us, the intent of the White House in having the family meet personally with the President was to ensure that the Olson family pursue a course that would enable the government to maintain secrecy even as it was being alleged that the full story concerning this incident was being released.

Despite the government’s claim to have released all information pertinent to the death of Frank Olson, we still have not received the information that the White House was so concerned to keep secret.

The 1975 White House documents include the following comments:

First, a passage from a September 1975 memorandum by White House attorney Roderick Hills addressed to Richard Cheney:

The Defense to the Olson Claim. …

two circumstances affect our analysis of the Justice Department position.

(i) The bizarre circumstances of his death could well cause a court of law to determine as a matter of public policy that he did not die in the course of his official duties.

(ii) Dr. Olson’s job is so sensitive that it is highly unlikely that we would submit relevance to the court on the issue of his duties.

The latter circumstance may mean as a practical matter we would have no defense against the Olson law suit. In this connection, you should know that the CIA and the Counsel’s office both strongly recommend that the evidence concerning his employment not be released in a civil trial.

In short, there is a significant possibility that a court would either (a) grant full discovery to the Olsons’ attorneys to learn of Dr. Olson’s job responsibilities; or (b) rule that as a matter of public policy, a man who commits suicide as a result of a drug criminally given him cannot as a matter of law be determined to have died “in the course of his official duties.”

If there is a trial, it is apparent that the Olsons’ lawyer will seek to explore all of the circumstances of Dr. Olson’s employment as well as those concerning his death. It is not at all clear that we can keep such evidence from becoming relevant even if the government waives the defense of the Federal Employees Compensation Act. Thus, in the trial it may become apparent that we are concealing evidence for national security reasons and any settlement of judgment reached thereafter could be perceived as money paid to cover-up the activities of the CIA.

These comments are from the same White House attorney, Roderick Hills, who was simultaneously advising us that we should not go to court because the law was not on our side.

Obviously it was not possible for the Olson family in 1975 to assess the government’s story of what Hills refers to here as Frank Olson’s “bizarre death” as long as the family was being misinformed as to the job Olson was doing—a job that Hills describes as so “sensitive” that the government would refuse to describe it.

The same concerns are evident in a memo that was written by White House Deputy Staff Director Dick Cheney to his boss Donald Rumsfeld on July 11, 1975, the day after our family press conference. In this memo Cheney refers to concerns about:

…the possibility that it might become necessary to disclose highly classified national security information in connection with any court suit, or legislative hearings on a private bill intended to provide additional compensation to the family.

Again, these comments have to be placed in the context of assurances given to us personally by the President of the United States that we would be provided with all relevant information concerning the death of our father.

IV. What’s it all about?

What do we learn, finally, from the harrowing story of the death of Frank Olson and its half-century concealment?

In the years after World War II the United States was busy learning what it could from the two powers it had just defeated—information it would then employ in its new battle against the Soviet Union. This occurred on both of World War II’s major fronts, and Detrick was involved in both.

Detrick scientists made a secret deal to obtain the results of Japanese biological warfare research that had entailed some of the most ghastly human experiements of the century. One of those scientists lived just across the highway from where we are sitting today, about a quarter of a mile from here. And Detrick scientists were also involved in collaboration with former Nazi scientists to obtain the results of experiments that had been performed in the death camps.

A Cold War context in which unethical research was being absorbed and sponsored was bound to see extreme forms of discipline and sanction applied to those who raised ethical questions or who might be likely to do so. In the wake of the Nuremberg trials in the late 1940’s the United States could not afford to be exposed as a sponsor of the sort of research it had prosecuted the Nazis for undertaking. Lacking a Siberia to which the reluctant could be sent, extreme security measures in the US took a more complex form.

We are familiar with the health risks to which workers in plutonium plants were subjected during the Cold War. And we are familiar with the risks taken with the lives of persons who were subjects of unwitting government experiments of various kinds. We are familiar with the stories of those whose lives were ruined when they became victims of unjustified accusations during the McCarthy witch hunts. The discrediting of Manhattan Project director Robert Oppenheimer, which began just two weeks before Frank Olson was killed, illustrates the jeopardy into which highly-regarded scientists who dared to criticize American weapons development in the early 1950’s were placed.

These are all phenomena that have become part of the record of Cold War history, a dark side of this nation’s history during that painful era. But even in this company the true story of Frank Olson opens a new chapter. “National security homicide” and “secret state assassination” are not terms with which we are familiar in this country. There are no other terms for Frank Olson’s “bizarre death,” and for the elaborate disinformational edifice that has been erected to obscure it.

V. Conclusion: An MIA with a name

With the information concerning biological weapons in the Korean War on the one hand and the information about the White House coverup in 1975 on the other, the story of the death of Frank Olson finally hit bottom. Frank Olson did not die as a consequence of a drug experiment gone awry. He died because of security concerns regarding disavowed programs of terminal interrogation and the use of biological weapons in Korea. This secret was so immense that even twenty-two years later the White House had been enlisted to maintain it.

The body that had floated to the surface of the murky lake had at last been reinserted into the network of shady, disavowed operations that led to the murder. Amazingly, the solution to the mystery had pertained to the most obvious fact of all concerning Frank Olson, but one that was conspicuously missing from the accounts in 1975: Frank Olson was a founding member and in the year prior to his death he was chief of the country’s most secret biological warfare laboratory.

For just under half a century the death of Frank Olson has been a weighty burden for the Olson family. But this is far more than a family story, which is why for many years it has been avidly followed by many people in this country and others.

At the end of this story one’s mind is inevitably drawn back to that Washington Post article which, under the ironic headline “Suicide Revealed,” reported the anonymous suicide of an “Army scientist.” Clearly the intent was that Frank Olson was an MIA who should remain forever nameless.

Frank Olson does have a name. Finally, forty-nine years after his death, he also has a story. We therefore feel ready to rebury the physical remains of our father, our grandfather.

Editor’s note: In 1998, WorldNetDaily first reported on the CIA’s secret behavior-modification program MK-ULTRA, which included experimentation with LSD on unsuspecting subjects. Authors H.P. Albarelli Jr. and John Kelly’s upcoming book deals with the mysterious death of one of those subject, Dr. Frank Olson. In this report, Albarelli and Kelly disclose new evidence they have uncovered in this case. By H.P. Albarelli Jr. and John Kelly

To view this article in on the WorldNet site go to WorldNet Daily and enter “Olson and CIA” in the WND search box at left side of the page. Links are also provided to three additional, previously published WorldNet articles pertaining to the Frank Olson case.

“I would turn our gaze from the past,” pronounced CIA Director George Tenet recently before Congress. “It is dangerous, frankly, to have to keep looking over our shoulders.” Whether Tenet had the unsolved death of Dr. Frank Olson in mind is not known, but there is little doubt that it is on his mind today.

Informed sources revealed this week that the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is reviewing dramatic new evidence in the Olson case. The evidence is said to involve the Jan. 8, 1953, death of Harold Blauer and its subsequent elaborate cover-up.

Blauer, a widely respected tennis professional, died nine months before Olson after being injected with a massive dose of a mescaline derivative at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Blauer was being treated at the Institute for depression related to a broken marriage, but the injection was not part of his treatment. It was administered only as part of a top-secret Army-funded experimental program. The program, codenamed Project Pelican, was overseen by Dr. Paul H. Hoch, director of experimental psychiatry at the Institute, who worked in secret collaboration with the Army Chemical Corps chief of clinical research, Dr. Amedeo Marrazzi.

Born in Hungary and schooled in psychiatry in Germany, Hoch came to the U.S. in 1933 on a visitor’s visa and soon legally immigrated with the assistance of then-attorney and future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. (At the time of Frank Olson’s death, Allen Dulles, brother of John Foster, was head of the CIA.) Before joining the Institute’s staff, Hoch headed the Manhattan State Hospital Shock Therapy Unit and worked as chief medical officer for war neuroses for the U.S. Public Health Service.

Hoch, along with associates Dr. Harold A. Abramson and Dr. Max Rinkel, was among an elite group of five private researchers and six U.S. Army physicians who began quietly conducting LSD experiments in the U.S. in 1949.

Rinkel, the man responsible for first transporting LSD into this country, supplied the drug to Hoch and Abramson in that same year. Rinkel, who fled Nazi Germany before the war to work at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, had known both Abramson and Hoch when all three studied together at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Germany. According to 1998 interviews with former-CIA official Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, it was Rinkel’s close associate, Dr. H.E. Himwich, along with the Army’s Dr. L. Wilson Greene, who first drew the CIA’s attention to the “wonders of LSD.”

When he died in 1965, Hoch was eulogized by two of his closest friends, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, who would soon be exposed as administrator of some of the most horrendous CIA-funded experiments on record, and New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller.

For nearly five years, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s cold-case unit has been conducting an unprecedented criminal investigation into the mysterious death of Fort Detrick biochemist Frank Olson. On Nov. 28, 1953, Olson allegedly dove through a closed and shaded 10th-floor hotel window in the middle of the night.

He plummeted 170 feet to his death on the sidewalk below. Uniformed policemen, summoned to the hotel by night manager Armondo Diaz Pastore, discovered CIA official Robert V. Lashbrook calmly sitting in the room he shared with Olson. Lashbrook identified himself only as a “consultant chemist” for the Defense Department and inexplicably told the officers that he saw no reason to go down to the street to check on his colleague. Lashbrook also told police that Olson had journeyed to Manhattan to be treated by Abramson for “depression related to an ulcer.”

Two detectives from the 14th Precinct dispatched to the Statler Hotel were suspicious about what they observed. At first, they suspected they had a “homosexual affair” gone bad on their hands. Detective James Ward initially referred to the case as a possible “homocide” in his report. Ward and his partner, detective Robert Mullee, took Lashbrook to the precinct house for interrogation. Within less than two hours, Lashbrook was set loose and the case was closed out as “D.O.A. Suicide.” The final police report makes no mention whatsoever of the CIA or any drugs, nor does the report on Olson’s death filed by the New York City Medical Examiners Office.

After his release from questioning at the 14th Precinct station, Lashbrook went to the Medical Examiners office to officially identify Olson’s body. There he was briefly interviewed by a stenographer before returning to spend another day at the Statler Hotel.

The Olson death remained a suicide stemming from depression for 22 years. Then in June 1975, a blue-ribbon commission chaired by Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller submitted a report on CIA domestic crimes to President Gerald Ford. In it, under a section headed “The Testing of Behavior-Influencing Drugs on Unsuspecting Subjects Within the United States,” the suicide of an unnamed man who jumped from a New York hotel after being given LSD “without his knowledge while he was attending a meeting with CIA personnel working on the drug project” was briefly mentioned.

The Olson family threatened to sue the government, were granted an Oval Office audience with President Ford, served a stately luncheon by then-DCI William Colby at the CIA’s Langley, Va., complex, and were generally placated with a pile of heavily redacted documents pertaining to Olson’s “suicide” and by a 1976 congressionally approved settlement in the amount of $750,000. At the time, Alice Wicks Olson, Frank’s widow, said she “was satisfied with the settlement” and that her family was ready to move on with their lives. After decades of doubts and confusion, it appeared that the strange story had finally found a fitting conclusion.

But then in 1994, Frank Olson’s only survivors, sons Eric and Nils, convinced noted forensic sleuth James E. Starrs of George Washington University, Washington, D.C., to disinter their father’s corpse and scientifically scrutinize the remains for any signs of suspected foul play.

Working with a team of 15 forensic experts, Starrs quickly discovered a number of peculiarities in the New York Medical Examiner’s 1953 report written by then-Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. Dominick DiMaio.

Starrs noted, “That report was brief and to the point, but it was a report of what was only an external examination of the remains.” Starrs was troubled that “the accompanying toxicological report only assayed the presence of methyl and ethyl alcohol, including no drugs of any kind.” This despite that Olson had allegedly been dosed with LSD and given “nembutal” shortly before his death.

Starrs was even more puzzled to discover that Olson’s body lacked any lacerations on the face and neck. Said Starrs, “This finding stood in contradistinction to that of Dr. DiMaio in his report of his external examination of Dr. Olson’s remains in 1953.” Continued Starrs, “It is a matter of some consternation how Dr. DiMaio could have reported the existence of multiple lacerations on the face and neck of Frank Olson when in truth, there were none.”

In addition to these discrepancies in the medical examiner’s report, Starrs discovered a “highly suspicious” hematoma over Olson’s left eye that he concluded was “singular evidence of the possibility that Olson was struck a stunning blow to the head prior to exiting the window.” There was no mention of this hematoma in the 1953 medical examiner’s report.

Armed with Starrs’ startling findings, the Olson brothers retained high-powered Washington, D.C., attorney Harry Huge of Powell, Goldstein, Frazer, & Murphy, to convince Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau to open a murder investigation. Earlier in 1975, spurred by the LSD revelations of the Rockefeller Commission, Morgenthau’s office had briefly considered doing so but for reasons reportedly tied to the Olson family’s settlement decided not to pursue the case. At the same time, DiMaio told reporters that he had been told nothing in 1953 about Olson being given LSD or having been brought to New York to see a physician.

DiMaio said that Robert Lashbrook, when questioned by the medical examiner’s stenographer, Max Katzman, failed to say anything about Olson having taken LSD or that he was under psychiatric treatment. DiMaio also said that while it “was routine for his office to review the police report in such cases,” the report on Olson’s death had “not been forwarded.”

Pertinent to note here is that the police report, dated Nov. 30, 1953, clearly states that Olson was being examined by Abramson for “a mental ailment” and that Abramson “had advised” that Olson “enter a sanitarium as he was suffering from severe psychosis and illusions.”

On March 31, 1995, attorney Huge sent Morgenthau a 12-page memorandum that methodically argued why an investigation should be opened. Within weeks, Morgenthau agreed with Huge’s findings and assigned the reopened case to his newly created cold-case unit headed by seasoned prosecutors Stephen Saracco and Daniel Bibb.

According to informed sources, newly emerging evidence in the Olson case revolves around Harold Blauer’s death and a number of previously unrevealed links between the CIA, Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division, or SOD, Olson’s place of work and the New York City Medical Examiners Office.

Cold case prosecutors Saracco and Bibb have learned that, contrary to long-standing reports, both the CIA and SOD had a direct interest in the experiments conducted at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Sources say that Saracco and Bibb have obtained “incontrovertible evidence” that reveals that CIA officials Lashbrook and Gottlieb, as well as officials from the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office, directly participated in the cover-up of Blauer’s death. Gottlieb was the CIA branch chief that ordered “the experiment” with LSD that allegedly resulted in Olson’s suicide. In 1986, Lashbrook denied that he had any knowledge about Blauer’s death.

But a top-secret CIA memorandum obtained by the authors reveals that Lashbrook knew far more than he claimed. The document, written in January 1954, details a conversation Lashbrook had with a high-ranking Pentagon official who telephoned the CIA to inquire if the agency “had heard that the Chemical Corps was being sued” because “of an incident involving the use of chemical compounds” at “the New York Psychiatric Institute, which is affiliated with Columbia University.” The memo states: “A Dr. Paul Hoch was the Institute’s principal investigator. He was carrying out experiments involving the injection of Mescalin [sic] derivatives into patients. In this particular case the patient died. Relatives of the deceased have brought the action.”

The document goes on to detail that Lashbrook “had been advised of these facts by Dr. Marrazzi, civilian employee of the Medical Laboratory,” and that both Lashbrook and Gottlieb advised the inquiring Pentagon officer that Marrazzi “was keeping [CIA] informed of their various activities along these lines.” The document continues, “Chemical Corps’ contract is for approximately $1,000,000 dollars. We took a $65,000 financial interest in this place of research around 23 February 1953, after the referenced incident occurred.”

The memorandum goes on to explain that following Lashbrook’s telephone conversation, Gottlieb contacted the Pentagon officer the next day “and advised him we did not want the Agency’s name mentioned in connection with the case since we were in no way involved.” The officer, according to the memo, “assured” Gottlieb that the Agency “will not be mentioned and that he would keep us informed.” The last several sentences of the memo read: “Further information supplied by [officer] was that the lawyer [for the Blauer family] was a military man and had been advised the case involved military connections. The lawyer stated he would give the case no publicity. And finally, the reason for [officer’s] contacting the Agency in the first place was to see if we could help them in any way to hush the thing up. He advised they are now using other channels.”

Other recently discovered documents concerning Blauer’s death reveal a more complete portrait of the specifics surrounding the experiments at the Psychiatric Institute. A 1975 CIA document written by Technical Services Inspector General, Donald F. Chamberlain, reads: “The Army Inspector General informed me that the Army’s Special Operations Division, Fort Detrick (the unit that Frank Olson was in) had a contract for two years with the Psychiatric Institute (1952-53) to test various mescaline-related and other drugs [including LSD] that the Army was interested in. Blauer died 2-1/2 hours after an injection of an apparent overdose of 450 milligrams of EA 1298 [mescaline-related drug].”

That it was Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division that initiated the secret contracts with the New York State Psychiatric Institute is significant because the division was established with CIA assistance for the exclusive purposes of devising biological weapons that, according to CIA documents, could be targeted “at individuals for the purposes of affecting human behavior with the objectives ranging from very temporary minor disablement to more serious and longer incapacitation to death.” These purposes seriously call into question the motivations behind the “experiment” on Blauer.

Nearly a year before Blauer’s death, beginning in 1952, the relationship between the CIA and Fort Detrick’s SOD was formalized through a written agreement. It was officially referred to as Project MK/NAOMI, an adjunct to the larger CIA behavior modification program that within months became known as MK-ULTRA. According to former CIA officials, Project MK/NAOMI was named after Abramson’s assistant, Naomi Busner. Abramson, from 1951 through to at least the late 1960s, served as a high-level researcher for the CIA and Army. Earlier in 1943-1944, Olson, assigned to Division D at the Chemical Corps’ Edgewood Arsenal, and Abramson worked closely together on a prototype project involving simulated exercises aimed at biological-contamination of the New York City water supply.

Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division was the top-secret Chemical Corps branch that was Olson’s assigned place of work at the time of his death. Contrary to conventional press accounts, CIA-employee Olson was not a simple research scientist with SOD but was a high-ranking division administrator holding the titles assistant division chief and director of plans and assessments. Prior to that, according to military and CIA records, he served as the division’s director of planning and intelligence activities and as director of the SO division itself for about 12 months.

Documents uncovered by the authors reveal that within 48 hours of Blauer’s death, Dr. Amedeo Marrazzi, the Chemical Corps contract officer for Project Pelican, traveled to the New York State Psychiatric Institute on Jan. 10 and met with Hoch. According to several documents, Marrazzi instructed Hoch to do everything possible to conceal the Army’s involvement in Blauer’s death. Additionally, documents reveal: “Marrazzi indicated in his trip report that while he was in New York he prevailed on one of the New York City Medical Examiners with whom he was well acquainted to place all the records (regarding Blauer) in a confidential file in the medical examiners office. Thus the Medical Examiner was informed that Blauer’s death was connected with secret Army experiments, but he was also told that this information was not to be disclosed.” This was the same office of the New York City Medical Examiner that months later received the body of Frank Olson.

Contacted at his home, retired medical examiner DiMaio said, “I don’t recall the incident involving Harold Blauer.” On Frank Olson’s death, he said, “It was a long time ago. They [the police] told me he was on LSD and had been acting aberrant and erratic for a while. There was no reason to do an autopsy.”

CIA spokesman Tom Crispwell declined to comment on any of the new evidence being examined by the District Attorney’s Office.
He said, “CIA activities related to the MK-ULTRA program were thoroughly investigated in 1975 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research. The CIA cooperated with each investigation.”

Olson family attorney Harry Huge said, “We are monitoring these developments closely and are very encouraged that we may now have the means to pursue things further. For obvious reasons, this is an extremely difficult case. The district attorney’s prosecutors have diligently logged hundreds of hours working on it, and we’re anxious about additional findings that may be forthcoming.”

Portions of this article were taken from the forthcoming book, A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Cold War Experimentsby H.P. Albarelli Jr. and John F. Kelly.

To view these articles on the WorldNet site go to WorldNet Daily and enter “Olson and CIA” in the WND search box at left side of the page. Links are also provided to three additional

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THE OLSON FILEA secret that could destroy the CIA

by Kevin Dowling and Phillip Knightley

Dr. Frank Olson’s life was a mystery, full of dubious experiments for the CIA, and unexplained trips to Porton Down. His death, in 1953, was stranger still. Was it suicide? A failed exercise in brainwashing? Or murder? And what did he know that made his death so convenient? Next week, a grand jury may finally hear the truth about the Cold War’s darkest Secret.

Published in Night and Daymagazine, the Sunday supplement to The London Mail on Aug 23, 1998.

Reprinted June 12, 1999 in Dagens Nyheter, largest newspaper in Sweden. Used here with permission of the authors.

In the early hours of 28 November 1953, Armand Pastore, the night manager of the Statler Hotel, New York, was startled to hear a crash of breaking glass and then a sickening thump on the pavement outside his hotel. He rushed out to find a middle-aged man lying semi-conscious on the ground.

Pastore looked up to see light shining from a shattered window of a room on the hotel‚s thirteenth floor. He knelt down alongside the man, cradled his head in his arms and leaned closer as the man made an effort to speak, then died. He had obviously jumped out of the window, just another suicide in a city where the plunge from skyscraper to pavement was a shocking but not unusual event.

Suicide was certainly the finding at the inquest—Dr Frank Olson, a United States Army scientist, for reasons no one could fathom, had taken his own life. And that was what the record showed for the next twenty-two years.

Then in 1975 the Rockefeller Commission, set up by President Ford to examine the extent of the CIA‚s illegal domestic operations, revealed that an unnamed army scientist had died after CIA experts, experimenting with mind-bending drugs, had secretly slipped him a dose of potent LSD. During the ensuing uproar, the scientist was identified as Frank Olson.

The US government moved immediately to show how sorry it was for what had happened. Congress passed a private humanitarian relief bill which authorised a payment of $750,000 to the widow, Mrs Olson, and her three children. Mrs Olson and her son Eric were invited to the White House where President Ford publicly apologised to them. And the then CIA director, William Colby, held a lunch for Mrs Olson and Eric in his office at the CIA, apologised and gave them the CIA file on the case.

According to the file, Olson had suffered a “chemically-induced psychotic flashback” a week after he had been slipped the dose of LSD. So a CIA doctor, Richard Lashbrook, had been deputed to look after Olson until he was normal again. Lashbrook had been sharing the hotel room with Olson and was asleep in a bed next to him when, he said, he was awoken by the sound of breaking glass and realised that Olson had crashed through the window.

Eric, who is now 54,was never very convinced by this version of events but kept quiet so as not to distress his mother. Then when she died in 1994 he decided to test the official story of his father’s death. Experts told him that in order to achieve the momentum needed to vault over a central heating radiator under the window, burst through the closed blinds and smash through the hotel’s heavy glass panes, Olson would have had to struck the window travelling at more than 30km per hour. A trained athlete takes about fifty metres to accelerate to that speed. But the hotel room was only 5.5 metres long.

Next there was Dr. Lashbrook‚s strange behaviour when the hotel manager Pastore arrived in the room to tell him that his colleague was dead on the pavement below. Lashbrook went to the telephone, rang a number and simply said, “Olson’s gone”. Then he hung up and retired to the bathroom where he sat on the lavatory with his head in his hands.

Eric Olson, a Maryland clinical psychologist, began to spend every spare moment trying to get at the true story of what had happened to his father. Today he is convinced he is on the brink of doing so. But the story is so strange, so reminiscent of the TV series “The X-Files,” that despite compelling evidence, it is uncertain that anyone will believe it.

THE TERMS of the $750,000 government settlement for Olson‚s death prevented his family from pursuing the matter in the civil courts. But if Eric Olson could convince the authorities that his father’s death was a criminal matter, then he might eventually get at the truth. Four years ago he had his first breakthrough when he won a court order to exhume his father’s body.

“When he was buried the coffin had been sealed. They said he had been so badly mutilated in the fall that it wouldn’t be right for the family to see him. But when we opened the casket a lifetime later, I knew Daddy at once. He had been embalmed and his face was unmarked and untroubled. He hadn‚t been hurt the way they said he had.”

A new autopsy confirmed Eric Olson’s impression and entirely contradicted the findings of the first inquest. Carried out by a team led by James Starrs, Professor of Law and Forensic Science at The National Law Centre, George Washington University, it could find no sign of the cuts and abrasions that the first autopsy said had been caused by crashing through the window glass.

On the other hand, there was a haematoma, unrecorded at the first post mortem examination, on the left hand side of Olson’s skull. This had been caused by a heavy blow, James Starrs decided, probably from a hammer, before the fall from the window. Starrs and his team concluded that the evidence from their examination was “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.”

Although the team did not say so—because it could be only supposition—someone had struck Olson on the head with a hammer, smashed open the window, probably with the same hammer, and had then thrown Olson out. But the new autopsy findings were certainly enough for a New York public prosecutor, Stephen Saracco, to win the right for a grand jury to begin hearing the evidence he had uncovered. If the jury, too, found the evidence of murder compelling, then Saracco requested that it should hand down indictments for murder and conspiracy to murder.

Saracco, an ambitious, aggressive lawyer with no fear about taking on the American establishment, says that the men he wants named in the indictments will include some of America’s most respected CIA veterans and, if the grand jury agrees to his request to widen his investigations, former officers of the British Secret Intelligence and Security Services as well.

Already there are indications that the international intelligence community is running scared. The CIA and the Department of Justice have resisted Saracco ‘s attempts to subpoena Dr. Lashbrook, who now lives in California, to question him, among other things, about Olson’s last hours, the telephone call that Lashbrook made immediately after Olson’s death and the work that Lashbrook and Olson had been engaged in together.

Early in July, after months of negotiation, the two government departments gave in and agreed that the grand jury should hear Saracco’s team examine Lashbrook at Venture County Courthouse during the week beginning 24 August. Saracco has already offered Lashbrook immunity from prosecution in return for his testimony. He was too late, however, to do the same for William Colby, the CIA chief who apologised for Olson’s death.

On 27 April 1996, after Saracco won the right to a grand jury hearing, Colby who realised that he would be forced to give evidence, vanished from his country retreat about forty miles south of Washington. It looked as if he had left in a hurry: the lights and the radio were still on, his computer was still running, and a half finished glass of wine was on the table. The next day his empty canoe was found swamped on a sand bar. Five days later divers found a body identified as Colby’s. He had apparently been the victim of a boating accident.

If so, it would appear that Maryland waters are particularly unkind to retired members of the CIA. In 1978 another CIA officer, John Paisley, also vaanished there in another boating accident. A week after Paisley‚s abandoned boat was located, a body with a gunshot wound to the head was found. But the condition of the body meant that precise identification was impossible—making the area a conspiracy blackspot.

Suppose the grand jury does in the end find that the evidence that Olson was murdered and that the perpetrators were other CIA officers, there will still remain a major barrier to an eventual conviction–what was the motive? What was so sensitive to the CIA that it would kill one of its own? To find an answer we have to go back to the fifties when the two great ideologies of the 20th century, communism and capitalism, were locked in a battle to the death and no act no matter how morally shocking was ruled out in the struggle for victory.

THE NUCLEAR stand-off of the Cold War had sent both sides back to their drawing boards. If it were impossible to employ nuclear weapons without assuring mutual total destruction, what other weapons could the boffins come up with—given virtually unlimited funds and no moral restraints—that would win any future war? Two possibilities attracted attention. The first was bacteriological warfare.

Bacteriological warfare is remarkably cheap; it has been described as “the poor man‚s nuclear bomb.” A deadly virus sufficient to wipe out every living person over an area of one square mile would cost only about $50. In the 1950s both sides in the Cold War set up research establishments to develop biological weapons, methods of delivering them, and methods of protecting against them. Dr. Frank Olson worked in this area.

Trained as a biochemist, he had been employed since 1943 in the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland, was associated with a CIA secret research unit known at the time as MK-ULTRA, and came to Britain frequently between 1950-53 to work at the British Microbiological Research Establishment (MRE) at Porton Down. Olson was part of a team which was developing aerosol delivery systems for biological weapons that included staphylococcus enterotoxin, Venezuelan equine encephalo- myelitis, and anthrax. Olson seems to have concentrated on counter- biological warfare, trying to find vaccines and special clothing that would protect against attack.

Deadly effective though it may be, biological warfare has drawbacks. There is always the risk that it may get out of control and attack not only the enemy but those who decided to employ it in the first place. Like nuclear warfare, biological warfare could wipe out civilisation as we know it. So Olson and some of his colleagues became intrigued by another type of weapon altogether, one which attacked not the body but the mind.

Those scientists in the Western intelligence community who supported the idea of developing brain-washing programmes had two gurus—Dr Douglas Ewan Cameron, a Glasgow-born psychiatrist, and Dr. Sydney “The Gimp” Gottlieb, the CIA‚s top expert on brainwashing. Cameron won his post-graduate diploma in psychiatric medicine at the University of London before joining the staff at John Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, in 1926. He became convinced that the mentally ill posed a grave threat to Anglo-American civilisation and should be forcibly sterilised.

During the Second World War he was a member of the Military Mobilization Committee of the American Psychiatric Association and was appalled to learn that of the fifteen million men inducted into the US armed forces, two million had to be rejected on neuropsychiatric grounds, a proportion far higher than in any other nation. He set about finding remedies including electroshock (60,000 ECTs in a single year), lobotomies and other forms of psychosurgery, sensory deprivation and mind-altering drugs–all used on patients who had little or no say in their treatment. Conscientious objectors, many of them Quakers, were defined by Cameron as mentally-ill and sometimes forced to accept treatment.

When the end of the war revealed that the Nazis had been carrying out similar experiments—23 German doctors were convicted at Nuremberg—the Western intelligence community suddenly became very interested in Cameron’s work. This interest grew to an obsession after the Stalin show trials with the robotic, apparently artificially-induced confessions made by the accused. Then the behaviour of American POWs held in Chinese camps during the Korean War and their subsequent denunciation of the American way of life, futher convinced the CIA that the communists were already well advanced in mind control techniques. In intelligence circles there were rumours of a Soviet plot to place brain-washed zombies in the White House and other citadels of Western power.

The American response was MK-ULTRA. Its director, Dr. Gottleib, sought help from his Scottish hero, Cameron, and set him up with cover organisations to distance the CIA from some of the more abbhorent aspects of MK-ULTRA‚s work. So Cameron founded the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, ran a proprietary company called Psychological Assessment Associates, and contributed papers to learned journals on “Psychic Driving”, “The Restructuring of the Personality” and “Suggestion and Extra-Sensory Perception.”

The short term goals were to counter any communist plot to insert brain-washed assassins into the West. However, according to authors Gerald Colby and Charlotte Dennett, biographers of Nelson Rockefeller—one-time chairman of a committee overseeing the MK-ULTRA operation—the scientists also wanted to find drugs or techniques by which “a man could be surreptitiously drugged through the medium of an alcoholic cocktail at a social party . . . and the subject induced to perform the act of attempted assassination of an official in a government in which he was well-established socially and politically.”

A far-fetched ides, perhaps, but one whose currency was not limited to the CIA. A few years later, the surreptitious administration of a mind-altering drug in a drink at a party was suggested as a possible solution to a strange double death in Sidney, Australia. On the morning of January 1, 1963, Dr. Gilbert Bogel, and his lover, Mrs. Margaret Chandler, were found dead on a river bank after a riotous party given by staff of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. Bogle, a brilliant scientist, had told friends that he was about to go to the US to work on scientific research of great military importance. The deaths were never solved, but Sydney detectives became convinced that Bogle and his colleagues had been experimenting with LSD and the effect it produced on their thought-processes—the invitation to the New Year’s party required each guest to bring a painting done under the influenced of the drug—and their either by accident or by design someone had slipped the couple what turned out to be an overdose.

Repeated requests to the BBI under the Freedom of Information Act asking for details of the work that Boigle would have been doing in the US have met with refusal on the grounds of national security. But the speculation is irresistible that it might have involved experiments in mind control similar to those that Olson had worked on.

The long-term aim of these experiments with mind-altering drugs is thought by those who have studied the MK-ULTRA programme to have been to ensure the dominance of Anglo-American civilisation in the “war of all against all—the key to evolutionary success.” Brain-washing would be used not only to defeat the enemy but to ensure compliance and loyalty of one’s own population.

Where did Dr. Olson fit into all this? A Harley Street psychiatrist, Dr. William Sargant, now dead, was sent by the British goverment in the early 1950s to evaluate MK-ULTRA. On his return he told a colleague and friend, former BBC television producer, Gordon Thomas, that what Cameron and Gottlieb were up to was as bad as anything going on in the Soviet gulags.

Thomas, whose books include a 1988 study of the CIA’s forays into mind-control, Journey into Madness: Medical Torture and the Mind Controllers, says “Sargant told me that he had urged the British government to distance this country from it. He said it was blacker than black.” According to Thomas, Sargant told him that Frank Olson had come to Britain between 1950-53 to work on attachment at Porton Down and had also made frequent visits to “an intelligence facility” in Sussex. This is confirmed by entries in the special passport that Olson used.

The stamps on the passport, which declare that the bearer was on “official business for the Department of the Army” indicate a pattern of travel that took Olson between various British military airfields, France, Occupied Germany, Scandanavia and the United States between May 1950 and August 1953. Prosecuting attorney Saracco believes that something happened on one of these trips that holds the key to Olson’s death. Since the matter is still before a grand jury Saracco cannot talk about it but Gordon Thomas has his own idea of what it was. “The CIA was using German SS prisoners and Norwegian Quislings [collaborators] taken from jails and detention centres as guinea pigs to test Cameron’s theories about mind control. The agency preferred to conduct such clinical trials outside the United States because sometimes they were terminal—the human guinea pig ended up dead. Olson was accustomed to seeing lethal experiments done on animals but when human beings were used in this way it was too much for him. I believe that he wanted out.”

Mike Miniccino, an American businessman and historical researcher who has spent 25 years studying the MK-ULTRA programme and developing a database on its activities says that if Olson expressed doubts about MK-ULTRA and its work then he would have done so to William Sargant, the Harley Street psychiatrist, who had evaluated MK-ULTRA‚s work and who had been a close colleague of Olson’s.

And although—as we already know—Sargant wanted the British government to distance itself from the CIA’s work with MK-ULTRA, Miniccino says he nevertheless was committed to the principle of mind control and became the link between the British Secret Intelligence Service and MK-ULTRA. Miniccino adds, “So if Frank Olson expressed serious doubts about the MK-ULTRA project to Sargant, then he signed his own death warrant.”

What Miniccino is implying and what public prosecutor Saracco wants to prove is that the MK-ULTRA mind control project—with its clinical trials on unsuspecting human beings—was such a sensitive issue with the western intelligence community that it would go to any lengths to prevent an insider like Olson, from blowing the whistle.

Is this, then, what happened? Did Olson tell the British psychiatrist/SIS agent Sargant that he wanted out of the mind-control project, and that his conscience might compel him to reveal publicly what the intelligence services had been doing? Did Sargant then pass this on to SIS, who in turn told the CIA? Was a decision then taken to make certain that Olson never talked by destroying his memory with drugs and, when this failed, by murdering him and making it look like a suicide?

Apart from the evidence set out earlier, there is another compelling fact that supports this theory. Until Mrs Olson died in 1993, a regular visitor at her house was Olson’s former boss in Special Operations, Vincent Ruwet. Ruwet would spent long-daytime hours with Mrs Olson. The two would drink together at her house (Mrs. Olson became an alcoholic) while Ruwet listened to the problems she faced in bringing up her three fatherless children. Everyone considered him to be a sympathetic family friend. But newly-discovered documents reveal that Vincent Ruwet had been assigned by the CIA to “keep track of the wife.”. If Olson was a threat because of what he knew, and knowledge can be passed on, then the CIA would have to spy on all those who had been close to him in case he had told them the truth about MK-ULTRA? THE CIA has always maintained as a matter of historical record that it has never murdered an American citizen on American soil. If, as a result of Eric Olson’s persistence in trying to uncover what really happened to his father, and the investigating skills of public prosecutor Saracco, this turns out to be a lie, it could well be the beginning of the end of the agency.

Eric Olson says, “The Cold War is over and there are now ongoing national debates about the future of the CIA and about unethical medical testing on humans. My father’s case covers both. The use of hallucinogens, hypnosis, electroshock and other procedures in an attempt to control the way people behave was the CIA‚s equivalent of the Manhattan [atom bomb] Project. MK-ULTRA was secret, shocking and incredibly dangerous. They couldn‚t afford to take the risk of letting my father continue to be involved or, considering all he knew, allowing him to quit. So he was terminated instead. My father’s murder crossed a line in the sand which the U.S. government has always publicly respected. The guilty ones will not be allowed to get away with it.” Or as Fox Mulder would say, “The truth is out there.”

Frederick/Maryland. More than 40 years after his death, the body of former CIA scientist Dr. Frank Olson has been exhumed. Olson’s son Eric is convinced his father was murdered by agents of the American government because he wanted to leave the CIA. Dr. Frank Olson was an expert for anthrax and other biological weapons and had top security clearance. Forensic pathologists at George Washington University performed an autopsy and concluded that Olson probably was the victim of a violent crime.

00.50 Voice of Eric Olson
“I was strongly identifying with him, I loved him. And I am sure that’s why in the end I came to take on this task trying to figure out what had become of him.”

Title: “Code Name: Artichoke.”

1.36
It has been eight years since the exhumation. Eric Olson is still searching for the reasons behind his father’s death in November of 1953. Eric was nine years old at the time. It’s a quest he inherited as the oldest of three children. To solve the mystery of their father’s death.

2.01 Voice of Eric Olson
“My real memories of my father are not very many or very clear, because the trauma of his death really darkened a lot of these memories. His death was so dark and so unmentionable. After he died, it was a subject one couldn’t really go near.”

2.25
Eric Olson has returned to live in the house his father built for the family in Frederick in 1950. Back then, Olson senior was one of the biochemists responsible for the biological weapons center the U.S. army ran nearby. The anthrax letters that killed five and caused illness to several others have haunted Eric ever since. Could there be a connection between his father’s death five decades ago and the acts of terror taking place today? (3.00)

3.15
The deadly disease that frightened America after the terrorist attacks on September 11th seems to have come from the same US Army Laboratory in Frederick where Olson had worked: Fort Detrick.

3.31
The biological weapons lab was founded in 1943. At the time, the Americans feared Hitler might attack the allied troops with a virus or bacteria. They quickly produced gas masks and anthrax weapons, in order to be able to strike back in kind.

3.58
Dr. Frank Olson, an army captain and one of the first scientists at Fort Detrick, worked together with Norman Cournoyer. The two became good friends. Their first sons were born within a few days of each other in 1944.

4.18 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson:
“We worked about five months in this thing called aerosols to see if we could test gas masks and impregnated clothing to see how good they were. And then one day he was transferred to working on hot agents. He said: ‘Norm, how about working for me in the hot stuff?’ That’s how we always referred to it. N was Anthrax, X was botulism and so forth.” (4.53)

4.55
Christmas 1947. The war is finally over. Norman and his family celebrate together with Alice and Frank Olson and their children.

5.07 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson:
“Were we close? Yes! Very, very close, every day of the week for two and a half years. You are going to expect us to be close.”

5.17
Among the things his father left behind, Eric Olson found some home movies and slides. At first he didn’t pay them much attention. But today, he sees that material from a different point of view. Might it contain any indication of the secret anthrax research his father was doing after the war?

5.35
Frank Olson made a hobby of home movies. These scenes reveal nothing of his secret task involving deadly weapons. They show the perfect world of a young father, captured with the latest 8-mm camera to hit the market.

5.49
Frank Olson also used photography. He brought home a lot of slides from his many travels. His photographs also primarily show private moments.

6.02
Frank with his wife Alice and son Eric in 1945. Both in 1947 with son Eric and daughter Lisa. Christmas 1949 in a tuxedo. Alice had given birth to their third child, Nils, in the meantime.

6.19 Voice of Eric Olson:
“The whole subject of the relationship between a wife and a husband who is doing top secret, classified work is a subject one could discuss at some length. The wife develops uncanny kind of intuitions, about all the things that are not being said and she knows the limits of what she can ask. And for quite a long time, possibly ever since my father began working at Detrick, the whole business about the monkey dying was a very delicate matter for him.

When he would come home for lunch and have a certain kind of expression, she would immediately know that this meant that this morning all the monkeys had died, which meant that the experiment had been a success.”

7.06
Arthur Vidich is Frank Olson’s brother-in-law. Their families regularly spent their summer vacation together. Vidich remembers Frank Olson as an American patriot, who was enthusiastic about working for the Army’s biological weapons program.

7.22 Voice of Arthur Vidich/Brother-in-law of Frank Olson
“He was a person who believed in what he was doing, who felt the work that he was doing at the Center in Frederick was important for the United States. He considered himself a terribly loyal and patriotic person. That kind of an attitude of loyalty was one way of expressing your Americanism.”

7.58
Dr. Frank Olson had worked for the US Army’s biological weapons laboratory for exactly ten years when he died in New York in the wee hours of November 28, 1953. He spent the night at the Hotel Pennsylvania, along with a CIA agent who was there to guard him. That night, Frank Olson plunged to his death from his room on the hotel’s thirteenth floor. Through a closed window, it was said.

8.31
“Army Bacteriologist Dies In Plunge From New York Hotel”.

Nils, the youngest of Olson’s three children, scribbled on the clipping with a crayon.

8.43 Voice of Eric Olson:
“I was simply told that ‘Your father has had an accident,’ and that ‘he has died.’ The only detail that I was then given was that he had fallen or jumped out of a window. I remember quite clearly just being quite stupefied by this.

As a nine-year-old I was old enough to have some idea of cause and effect. And I had no idea what does it mean to fall out of a window. How you fall out of a window in the middle of the night. What is that?”

9.20
Eric didn’t understand.

And for his mother, the subject of his father’s death became a taboo.

9.33
The search for the circumstances surrounding the mysterious death of Dr. Frank Olson begins in 1945, with the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau, Germany. American troops discovered the corpses of hundreds of prisoners who had been murdered or starved to death. Many of the survivors told US doctors about cruel experiments the camp’s doctors carried out using disease germs and various drugs.

9.59
A few weeks later, at Kransberg Castle north of Frankfurt, the scientific elite of Nazi Germany is arrested and questioned by American officers. The name of the project is “Operation Dustbin.” The American military hopes to evaluate and exploit the findings German researchers made during the war. Among the prisoners at Kransberg Castle is rocket scientist Professor Hermann Oberth, who collects autographs from his colleagues.

10.33
Also at Kransberg Castle: Some of the leading scientific experts in Nazi Germany had been involved in biological warfare, testing the effects of deadly germs on human beings in Dachau and other concentration camps. One of them was Professor Kurt Blome. Blome was the Third Reich’s Deputy Surgeon General and the man behind German research into biological weapons.

10.55
Blome will be among those charged in the case against concentration camp doctors brought before the military tribunal in Nuremberg. He will face the death penalty.

11.07
In spite of the fact that there is enough evidence against him, Kurt Blome will be acquitted in Nuremberg. The Americans have other plans for him.

11.21 Voice of Professor Kurt Blome: Untertitel // Subtitles
1) I stated publicly and openly that I was a conscientious National Socialist…

2) and a follower of Adolf Hitler.

11.29 Voice of Norman Cournoyer
“We were interested in anyone who did work in biological warfare. Did they want to use that? The Nazis? Yes, absolutely! They wanted to use anything that killed people. Anything!”

11.48
The Americans save Kurt Blome, seen here on the left, from death by hanging. In turn, he provides them with information about the Nazi biological weapons program. One of the specialists interrogating Blome is Donald Falconer, a friend and colleague of Frank Olson. Falconer is responsible for developing anthrax bombs.

12.12
Today, more than 50 years later, Donald Falconer lives in a convalescent home not far from Frederick.

12.22
Eric Olson has visited Falconer several times, hoping his father’s old friend might one day confide a crucial secret in him. But Falconer refuses to say anything, feeling bound by his military oath, and doesn’t want to be interviewed.

12.45
In one of his father film’s, immediately following images of his grandfather, Eric discovers a sequence that seems to show secret crop-dusting flights that took place in 1947. Using the findings of Blome and other Nazi scientists, the Americans experimented with artificial diseases capable of destroying crops.

13.07
After this short clip, more family pictures of the children.

13.15
Meanwhile, in Fort Detrick, a massive arms program is taking place with bacteriological weapons, primarily anthrax spores, which have proven to be highly resistant and therefore suitable for biological warfare.

13.29
Anthrax was cultivated in this building, then placed in bombs. The Americans are concerned about the Soviets’ biological arsenal. If the cold war should ever turn hot, deadly bacteria might be used as weapons. The army demands ample weapons at the ready.

13.50
Frank Olson often uses the Air Force to test germ warfare in the field, for example on the Caribbean island of Antigua. These tests are carried out to monitor the spread of diseases under realistic conditions. Most of the tests Olson’s team carries out in the Caribbean and on the Alaskan tundra deal with relatively harmless bacteria, but some tests are conducted using actual pathogens – called “hot stuff.”

14.20 Voice of Norman Cournoyer:
“We did not use anthrax, we used bacillus globigii which is very similar a spore as Anthrax is. So to that extent we did do something that was not kosher. We picked it up all over. It was picked up months after it.”

14.50
It’s an easy-going life they lead, but they have a secret mission. In California, Olson and his team drive up the Pacific coast in a yellow convertible to prepare an experiment to take place over San Francisco Bay. Spores will be released in order to test the city’s vulnerability to an act of Russian sabotage. Frank Olson loves life and has little interest in following rules. His unconventional manner seems inconsistent with his job working for the army.

15.21
In October of 1949, Olson is suspected of disclosing government secrets. He is interrogated by military intelligence.

15.30
(visual texts) “Olson was mildly impatient with the questioning conducted during the course of this interview. This attitude is regarded as typical by persons at Detrick who are acquainted with him.”

“Olson is violently opposed to control of scientific research, either
military or otherwise, and opposes supervision of his work. He does not follow orders, and has had numerous altercations with MP’s (…)”

15.52 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson:
“He was very, very open and not scared to say what he thought. For that matter to the contrary. He did not give a damn. Frank Olson pulled no punches at any time. And I don’t know. That’s what they were scared of, I am sure. He did speak up any time he wanted to. Was he gonna be caught on this? Could be. Could be.”

16.22
As the scientist responsible for biological warfare experiments, Frank Olson was among the most important holders of confidential information during the Cold War.

November 1953. Four years after he was suspected for disclosing secrets – an accusation that was never proved: During a trip to New York, Olson is accompanied by a CIA agent who watches him constantly, never leaving his side. Olson and the CIA agent take a room in the famous Hotel Pennsylvania. So, what are they doing in New York?

17.00
Armand Pastore is the manager of the hotel. He is on duty that night, when Frank Olson falls from the 13th floor, landing on the sidewalk in front of the hotel.

17.12 Voice of Armand Pastore/Former hotel manager:
“He was laying there looking at me, trying to speak to me, very earnest
look in his eyes, wide open …. but there was blood everywhere: blood from his nose, blood from his eyes, blood from his ears, there was a bone protruding from his left arm, sticking straight out. And I kept trying to speak to him, but we were not really communicating, because I could not understand anything he was saying, and then finally he died.”

17.48
Pastore notifies the police and accompanies them to the 13th floor. In the meantime, he has determined that Olson must have fallen to his death from 1018A, and that there was probably another person in the room at the time.

18.03 Voice of Armand Pastore/Former hotel manager:
“’Wait a minute’, I said, ’it is possible that there is somebody in there’. Then they became alert and they pulled their guns out and said: ’You open the door and we’ll go in.’ I opened the door with my key and they rushed in. Here this guy was sitting in the commode with the hands on his knees, his hands up to his head. The cops said ’what happened’ he said: ’I don’t know, I just heard a crash of glass and I then I see, that Frank Olson is out of the window. And he is down on the street.’”

18.50
The CIA shadow testifies that he was fast asleep and didn’t hear Olson get out of bed. He can offer no explanation for the suicide. He has nothing else to say. He makes no statement regarding the reason the two were visiting New York. The case is closed quickly. No one is interested in the telephone call that was made from Olson’s room immediately following his death.

19.15 Voice of Armand Pastore/Former hotel manager:
“The operator said, ’yes there was one call out of that room’. So I said ‘What was the conversation?’ She said the man in the room called this number out in Long Island and said ‘Well, he’s gone’ and the man on the other end said ’Well, that’s too bad’ and they both hung up.”

19.39
Was that the CIA agent reporting that he had solved the “Frank Olson problem” in the Hotel Pennsylvania?

19.50
Eric Olson in New York. For years now, he has been searching for witnesses who might know something about his father’s death, which he considers to be a murder perpetrated by the CIA. He wants to know the motive. Was the government afraid Frank Olson might reveal state secrets? The recent terror attacks involving anthrax were a shock to Eric.

20.28
Eric finds himself wondering about a lot of things. Was the anthrax terrorist one of our own? Is that the reason he hasn’t been caught? Because he knows something no one else should find out about? A secret his father knew, too?

20.44
In a suburb of New York, Eric Olson meets long-time CIA veteran Ike Feldman. In the fifties, he worked in drug enforcement. At least, that was the official version. Although Feldman never met Eric’s father personally, he discovered some information about the circumstances of his death.

21.07 Voice of Ira (“Ike”) Feldman/Former CIA agent:
“The source that I have was the New York City Police Department, the Bureau of Narcotics Agents and the CIA Agents themselves. They all say the same thing: that he was pushed out of the window and that he did not jump.

People who wanted him out of the way said he talked too much and he was telling people about the things he had done which is American secret. If you work on a top government secret, a city secret, a state secret, and it spills out to people who should not know, there is only one way to do it: kill him.”

21.46
In April of 1950, Dr. Frank Olson received a diplomatic passport, unusual for an army scientist. Did he have a new job? In the following years, he traveled often to Europe, including making several trips to Germany.

22.00 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson:
“He was a member of the CIA. I only found this out after he told me about it. To me he was a Captain. That’s all I knew about it at first. It turned out that he was a CIA agent. And stayed on, right on through to 1953.”

22.28
Pictures taken in Frankfurt and Heidelberg will later turn up among Olson’s slides. These cities were home to the US Army’s most important facilities in Germany. There is also a picture of the top secret CIA headquarters in Germany, located in the building of IG Farben in the heart of Frankfurt.

22.56
What is Olson’s new assignment? He is now working in an area that has nothing to do with biological weapons. Here, in the German offices of the CIA, the biochemist is conducting important conversations with US intelligence officers.

23.17
Increasingly, he can be found in the company of other CIA agents, including a certain John McNulty. It has to do with a top secret project to use chemicals, drugs and torture on human beings in order to break their will and make them submissive. Brainwashing.

23.35
The code name for this operation: Artichoke.

23.43
(Visual text!)
“The (…) team would enjoy the opportunity of applying
“Artichoke” techniques to individuals of dubious loyalty, suspected agents or plants and subjects having known reasons for deception.”

23.56
In Oberursel, in the Taunus hills north of Frankfurt, hidden in old half-timbered houses, the US Army led a quiet interrogation center: “Camp King”. It was primarily Soviet agents and defectors from East Germany who were kept here, people the CIA considered to be communist spies. Special teams, the so-called “rough boys”, interrogated the prisoners.

24.23
Former SS member Franz Gajdosch was hired just after the war by the Americans to tend the bar in the officers’ mess at Camp King. Sometime in the year of 1952, in the top secret interrogation center, Gajdosch runs across another German: Professor Kurt Blome.

24.42 Voice of Franz Gajdosch-dt./ Former barkeeper at “Camp King”:
“For a long time, Blome was a doctor at Camp King, he also ran the clinic. He was a protégé of the Americans, and had been a concentration camp doctor. He conducted experiments.”

25.03
The American officers who lived the good life at Camp King aren’t disturbed about Blome’s past. Was the former concentration camp doctor expected to lend his experience for their own planned experiments on human beings? A CIA consultant began planning the Artichoke experiments as early as September of 1951.

25.24
(Visual text!)
“The conversations at Oberursel pointed up (…) signs
and symptoms of drugs that might be used (…) We should look into the use of amnesia-producing drugs.”

25.34 Voice of Franz Gajdosch-dt./ Former barkeeper at “Camp King”:
“Of course their methods were not humane, they exerted a lot of pressure. There are ways of breaking people. At Camp King, they were notorious, the “rough boys” – anything somebody didn’t want to reveal, they would try to get it out of them.”

26.01
There are many indications that the cruel experiments involving human beings – “Operation Artichoke” – took place in this isolated CIA safe house near Camp King, at the edge of a town called Kronberg.

26.17
The former “Schuster Villa”, now called “Haus Waldhof”, was built shortly after the turn of the century as the summer residence of a Jewish banking family from Frankfurt. The Nazis confiscated it in 1934, and the Americans took it over after the war.

26.33 Voice of Franz Gajdosch-dt./Former bartender at “Camp King”:
“The neighbors, the community didn’t know who it was, what this place was, because the military personnel going in and out of the house weren’t in uniform, they wore civilian clothing. The vehicles had no license tags, so the community wasn’t even aware it was an American facility.”

26.58
At “House Waldhof,” in June 1952, the CIA begins conducting brain-washing experiments, using various drugs, hypnosis, and probably torture. One of the top secret protocols documents a Russian agent being pumped full of medication.

27.19
The goal of the experiments is to manipulate the human mind in order to extract secrets from its subjects. And then to erase their memory, so they can’t remember what happened to them.

27.38
Dr. Frank Olson arrived in Frankfurt on June 12, 1952, from Hendon Military Airport near London. He left the Rhine-Main region three days later, on June 15.

27.53
On June 13, experiments are conducted with “Patient No. 2”, a suspected Soviet double-agent.

28.03 Voice of Norm Cournoyer
“He was troubled after he came back from Germany one time. He came back and told me and he said Norm, I tell you right now you and I never talked about this, but we were both grown-ups and this was rough. He said ‘Norm, you would be stunned by the techniques that they used.’

They made people talk! They brainwashed people! They used all kinds of drugs, they used all kinds of torture.”

28.32
The CIA’s unscrupulous experiments on human beings continued the Nazi drug experiments they learned of during the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp.

28.43 Voice of Norman Cournoyer
“They were using Nazis, they were using prisoners, they were using Russians, and they didn’t care whether they got out of that or not.”

29.17
Meanwhile, the US army was conducting extensive experiments with a new miracle drug: LSD. Here, for example, a soldier was expected to assemble a rifle while under the influence of the hallucinogen.

29.35
The army’s LSD experiments took place on the campus of the Chemical Corps in Edgewood Arsenal. The scientists who worked in these laboratories in the early fifties, and who collaborated closely with Frank Olson, were looking for new hallucinogenic substances. They hoped to find a way to use the drugs on the battle ground.

30.04
Dr. Fritz Hoffmann, a chemist from former Nazi Germany, had been hired a few years earlier to spur the search for new behavior-modifying substances. Immediately after the war he courted the Americans, seeking to ensure a job in the United States.

30:21 Voice of Bennie E. Hackley/Chemical Corps US Army:
“There was an interest in the U.S. during that time in looking at mood-altering drugs from LSD to BZ and other possible mood-altering drugs. Fritz was interested in that area as well.”

30.50
After its experiments on soldiers, the army saw potential in using LSD and other drugs to sedate and “dope” enemy troops. In short order, it would be possible to conquer territory without a fight.

31.15
A short time later, the CIA begins conducting its own LSD experiments in the bohemian New York neighborhood of Greenwich Village, on Bedford Street. But unlike the army experiments, the subjects of these tests, which took place in an apartment disguised as a brothel, would not be informed. The CIA hired prostitutes to pour LSD into their customers’ drinks. And then lure them into revealing secrets.

31.41 Voice of Ira (“Ike”) Feldman/Former CIA agent
“My purpose was to see that we got guys up there we wanted to talk and through other people we got prostitutes to talk to these guys and each prostitutes would put something – which I found out later was LSD – into their drink and made them talk. Either they wanted to talk about narcotics, security or crime. This was all part of the CIA experiments. They called it ‘dirty tricks’”.

32.08
LSD, it was soon learned, was a much more effective way to loosen the tongue than alcohol was.

32.24
Deep Creek Lake in western Maryland, a three-hour drive from Washington. In an isolated vacation house at the edge of the lake, the CIA’s “dirty tricks” department converged here for a meeting with ten of its scientists in November 1953.

32.43
The meeting is about Artichoke. According to the invitation, it was a conference for sports journalists. But in reality, the participants, one of them Frank Olson, were to be placed under the influence of LSD.

32.58
One of the drinks has been spiked. Later, it will be said the CIA was conducting a kind of self test – but without the knowledge of the participants.

33.07 Voice of Ira (“Ike”) Feldman/Former CIA agent:
“I do not think again from what I heard, that he was drugged because he was a security agent. He was drugged because he talked too much.”

33.19
When Frank Olson was later briefed about the LSD experiment, he knew immediately what it meant: They had interrogated him with Artichoke techniques.

33.30 Voice of Eric Olson:
“Friday evening he came home and spent the weekend in this house with my mother, my brother and sister and me and during much of the weekend they sat on the sofa which was just over here. It was a foggy November weekend, as she described it, and they sat here, holding hands and staring out of this big window into the fog, and he described having made something he referred to as a terrible mistake.”

34.01
The CIA brings Olson, accompanied by an agent, to New York. In the hotel they are joined by a doctor working for the secret service, who administers medication. Frank Olson has become a security risk. But it seems the CIA has already found a solution.

34.24
Forty years later, at the Institute for Forensic Sciences at George Washington University. The body of Dr. Frank Olson has been exhumed and is undergoing an autopsy. Eric wants clarity, once and for all. And as it turns out, the results of the first autopsy in 1953 in New York were manipulated.

34.52 Voice of Prof. James Starrs/George Washington University:
“The report from New York City, from the Medical Examiner’s office which I had before me was totally inaccurate in some very important respects. It talks about lacerations, cuts of the flesh that in all probability might have been caused by glass in the course of his fall.

There were no lacerations. They were not there, totally non-existent.

We also noticed immediately that he had a hemorrhage, which we call a hematoma, which is under the skull by the frontal bone. That is only reasonably explainable as having occurred by reason of his being shall we say silenced, being rendered unable to defend himself, so that he could be tossed out of the window.”

35.54
Starrs arranges to visit the Pennsylvania Hotel with Armand Pastore, the hotel manager who found Frank Olson that night. Afterwards, he makes his judgment:

36.05 Voice of Prof. James Starrs/George Washington University:
“It is my view and a number of my team members, not all of them, that it was homicide.”

36.16
That would mean Frank Olson was first knocked out by a targeted blow and then thrown out of the open hotel window. Just a few months before the murder took place, the CIA had this “Study of Assassination” prepared, a how-to book for agents, on how to kill people without leaving any clues. In this report, it says:

36.37
(Visual text!)
“The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. (…) In some cases it will be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him.”

36.49 Voice of Prof. James Starrs/George Washington University:
“What was spelled out in that ‘Assassination Manual’ was almost letter for letter what happened to Doctor Olson and it was a protocol, as we call it, for an assassination, which fit like the fingers in a glove.”

37.10
So was it in fact murder? But for what reason? Why did Olson speak of a “terrible mistake” he had made?

37.24 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson:
“There is a piece missing and I am not sure that I am the one to give it to you. What happened was, that he just got involved in it in a way he was unhappy about it. But there was nothing he could do about it. He was CIA and they took it to the end.”

37.49
Summer 1953. Frank Olson and his father-in-law cut down a tree. Then the family goes to Tupper Lake on vacation. Just like every year. With Arthur Vidich, his wife and their children. Everything seems the same as always. But that appearance is deceiving. Frank is troubled by something. And he makes an attempt to confide in his brother-in-law Art.

38:16 Voice of Arthur Vidich/Brother-in-law of Frank Olson:
“I had never had a conversation with him about anything that might have involved moral values. What had startled me about it was that he had mentioned the Bible and that he was struggling with something. I knew that there was a problem that he was attempting to confront. But what that problem was, I did not know. I can visualize his face actually: It was drawn, in a way I had never seen it before.”

38.58
While the family enjoys summertime at the lake, Frank retreats into his own world.

39:03 Voice of Eric Olson:
“My mother also recalled that my father was short-tempered during that last summer. She knew that he had been going through some kind of crisis. She knew he had not been sleeping well, she knew he wasn’t really at peace. He had been agitated and worried about something and from time to time discussed leaving Detrick, leaving his job and retraining himself as a dentist. She had encouraged him to do this if that is what he wanted to do.”

39.37
In Asia, at that time, a bitter war was going on between allied US troops against the North Koreans and Chinese. It had already been going on for three years. It was the first, long-awaited and long-feared battle between the West and Communism. Could the Korean War have anything to do with Frank’s personal problems?

40.05
He still has an office here in Fort Detrick, in the US army’s center for biological weapons. At the same time, he is working for the CIA. Among the tasks of the dirty tricks department in Building 1412 are brainwashing, drugs and torture, as well as murder by means of poisons and bacteria.

40.27
On July 17, 1953, Olson celebrates his 43rd birthday with friends. A few days later, he leaves for the last trip he will ever take. He took his movie camera.

40.42
First stop: London. First objects filmed: Big Ben and a parade on the Mall.

40.52
Then on to Paris. Near the Eiffel Tower, his two CIA colleagues sit in a sidewalk café and watch pretty French girls go by, on the left is John McNulty.

41.07
“Paris, London, Stockholm”, Frank will later write on the packaging. His son Eric is seeing his father’s last film consciously for the first time.

41.18
Then, suddenly, a picture of the ruins of the Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate. The Soviet Memorial for the Victims of the Second World War. So Frank Olson was also in Berlin early in August 1953.

41.38
In Zehlendorf he photographs the headquarters of the American army.
Is Frank Olson on a secret Artichoke mission? Several top-level communist agents were being interrogated in Berlin at the time. It was a time of intense political and military tension in the divided city, just weeks after the civilian uprising in the Soviet sector. At the army headquarters in Berlin, Olson apparently witnessed brutal interrogation methods.

42.19 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson
“After he came back from Germany the last time he sounded different. When he talked to me he said, I can probably tell you things, that I can’t tell other people, because they are still in top secret material. The people he saw in Germany went to the extreme. He said: ‘Norm, did you ever see a man die?’

I said ‘No.’

He said, ‘Well, I did.’

Yes, they did die. Some of the people they interrogated died. So you can imagine the amount of work they did on these people.”

43.10 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson
“He said, that he was going to leave. He told me that. He said, ‘I am getting out of that CIA. Period’.”

43.19
In Korea, it’s just a matter of days before the first American prisoners of war will be released. Some of them will face charges of high treason, because they accused their own country of conducting biological warfare.

43.31 Voice of US Air Force Pilot (Prisoner of War in North Korea):
“If my son asked me what I did, what I did in Korea, how can I tell him that I came over here and dropped germ bombs on people destroying, and bringing death and destruction. How can I go back and face my family?”

43.48
Are their accusations accurate? Or are they themselves the victims of communist brainwashing? One thing is for certain: Back home, in freedom, the soldiers making these confessions will be interrogated again, using drugs and torture – by their own people!

(Visual text!)
“All hands agreed that (…) among the returning POWs
from Korea (…) the ‘hard core’ group and those who had been successfully indoctrinated were excellent subjects for Artichoke work.”

44.19
The American soldiers who claimed to have committed biological warfare were apparently manipulated using Artichoke techniques. This is documented in CIA papers. And indeed, all discredited their confessions.

44.30 Voice of US Air Force-Pilot (after his return):
“I did sign a confession, relating to germ warfare. The statements contained in this confession were false they were obtained under duress from Chinese communists. When making these statements I deliberately attempted to put in much as was false and ridiculous that I could possibly get away with.”

44.57 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson
“I took an oath when I left the Army that I would not talk about that. I am sorry.”

45.05
The Korean War Memorial in Washington honors the Americans who died in that fight. Of those who returned, some were interrogated by the CIA using cruel methods, and forced to rescind their confessions. But were the confessions the truth? Did the Americans in fact use biological weapons in the Korean War? As a test? And was this the secret Frank Olson knew, and might disclose?

Finally when one my father’s colleagues within the past year only told me that my father had come to understand that Korea was the key thing and that they were using biological warfare methods in Korea.

And then I preceded to ask him about the germ warfare confessions, this was alleged to be by the American government, these confessions made by the American servicemen were immediately discredited by the U.S. government under the idea that these were manipulated and produced only by the effect of brainwashing.

And at that point my father’s colleague looked at me as if to say ‘read-my-lips’: ‘it wasn’t all brainwashing’.”

46.24
Would this colleague, Norman Cournoyer, repeat this statement in front of the camera? He has never made a public statement. Neither about Frank Olson, nor about biological warfare in the Korean War. Will he, now in his 80s, pay last respects to his old friend Frank Olson? And to Frank’s son Eric, who takes part in this conversation?

46.46 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson
“I took an oath when I left the United States Army that I would never divulge that stuff.”

“You divulged it to me.”

“You cannot prove it, can you?”

“I can assert it. You told me.”

“Hearsay!”

“So you don’t want to say it?”

“No …. I don’t want to say it. But, there were people who had biological weapons and they used them. I won’t say anything more than that. They used them.”

47:24 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson:
“Was there a reason for your Dad being killed by the CIA? Probably so.”

47.44
Around Frederick, Maryland, where Frank Olson lived while working for both the US Army’s secret biological warfare program and the CIA, the FBI is still looking for the anthrax terrorist.

For months, the largest investigation in the history of American criminal justice has been underway. Should the perpetrator be accused and the case come to court, the government in Washington might be forced to reveal what Eric Olson believes is top secret information about illegal research on biological weapons, about the use of anthrax in the Korean War – and about his father’s murder.

48.30
Eric wants to tell his friend Bruce about the latest evidence. Bruce has been at his side throughout his years of research. Once, in the summer of 1975, the American government didn’t hesitate to see to it that the truth was not made known.

48.43
The conspiracy originated at the top, in the White House, initiated by Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney. It had just been learned that the CIA allegedly drugged its employee Frank Olson with LSD before his supposed suicide.

Rumsfeld and Cheney, heads of the White House chiefs of staff, at the time recommended to President Gerald Ford that he apologize to the family in the name of the government, and to support retribution. In order to prevent worse things from happening. That’s the content of this White House memo:

49.21
“There (is…) the possibility that it might be necessary to disclose highly classified national security information in connection with any court suit or legislative hearings.”

49.38
Ten days later, Ford hosted the Olson family and apologized. This allowed him to remain silent about state secrets – and the true reasons for Frank Olson’s death.

49.52 Voice of Eric Olson
“What this means for me is that a national security homicide is not only a possibility, but really it is a necessity, when you have a certain number of ingredients together.

If you are doing top secret work that is immoral, arguably immoral, especially in the post-Nuremberg period, and arguably illegal, and at odds with the kind of high moral position you are trying to maintain in the world, then you have to have a mechanism of security which is going to include murder.”

50.26
The two politicians who collaborated in the conspiracy in 1975, Rumsfeld and Cheney, are back in power. As vice president and secretary of defense of the government of the United States. The Frank Olson case, it seems, is far from being closed, even 50 years later. That, at least, is one thing of which Olson’s son is now certain.

Frederick/Maryland. More than 40 years after his death, the body of former CIA scientist Dr. Frank Olson has been exhumed. Olson’s son Eric is convinced his father was murdered by agents of the American government because he wanted to leave the CIA. Dr. Frank Olson was an expert for anthrax and other biological weapons and had top security clearance. Forensic pathologists at George Washington University performed an autopsy and concluded that Olson probably was the victim of a violent crime.

00.50 Voice of Eric Olson
“I was strongly identifying with him, I loved him. And I am sure that’s why in the end I came to take on this task trying to figure out what had become of him.”

Title: “Code Name: Artichoke.”

1.36
It has been eight years since the exhumation. Eric Olson is still searching for the reasons behind his father’s death in November of 1953. Eric was nine years old at the time. It’s a quest he inherited as the oldest of three children. To solve the mystery of their father’s death.

2.01 Voice of Eric Olson
“My real memories of my father are not very many or very clear, because the trauma of his death really darkened a lot of these memories. His death was so dark and so unmentionable. After he died, it was a subject one couldn’t really go near.”

2.25
Eric Olson has returned to live in the house his father built for the family in Frederick in 1950. Back then, Olson senior was one of the biochemists responsible for the biological weapons center the U.S. army ran nearby. The anthrax letters that killed five and caused illness to several others have haunted Eric ever since. Could there be a connection between his father’s death five decades ago and the acts of terror taking place today? (3.00)

3.15
The deadly disease that frightened America after the terrorist attacks on September 11th seems to have come from the same US Army Laboratory in Frederick where Olson had worked: Fort Detrick.

3.31
The biological weapons lab was founded in 1943. At the time, the Americans feared Hitler might attack the allied troops with a virus or bacteria. They quickly produced gas masks and anthrax weapons, in order to be able to strike back in kind.

3.58
Dr. Frank Olson, an army captain and one of the first scientists at Fort Detrick, worked together with Norman Cournoyer. The two became good friends. Their first sons were born within a few days of each other in 1944.

4.18 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson:
“We worked about five months in this thing called aerosols to see if we could test gas masks and impregnated clothing to see how good they were. And then one day he was transferred to working on hot agents. He said: ‘Norm, how about working for me in the hot stuff?’ That’s how we always referred to it. N was Anthrax, X was botulism and so forth.” (4.53)

4.55
Christmas 1947. The war is finally over. Norman and his family celebrate together with Alice and Frank Olson and their children.

5.07 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson:
“Were we close? Yes! Very, very close, every day of the week for two and a half years. You are going to expect us to be close.”

5.17
Among the things his father left behind, Eric Olson found some home movies and slides. At first he didn’t pay them much attention. But today, he sees that material from a different point of view. Might it contain any indication of the secret anthrax research his father was doing after the war?

5.35
Frank Olson made a hobby of home movies. These scenes reveal nothing of his secret task involving deadly weapons. They show the perfect world of a young father, captured with the latest 8-mm camera to hit the market.

5.49
Frank Olson also used photography. He brought home a lot of slides from his many travels. His photographs also primarily show private moments.

6.02
Frank with his wife Alice and son Eric in 1945. Both in 1947 with son Eric and daughter Lisa. Christmas 1949 in a tuxedo. Alice had given birth to their third child, Nils, in the meantime.

6.19 Voice of Eric Olson:
“The whole subject of the relationship between a wife and a husband who is doing top secret, classified work is a subject one could discuss at some length. The wife develops uncanny kind of intuitions, about all the things that are not being said and she knows the limits of what she can ask. And for quite a long time, possibly ever since my father began working at Detrick, the whole business about the monkey dying was a very delicate matter for him.

When he would come home for lunch and have a certain kind of expression, she would immediately know that this meant that this morning all the monkeys had died, which meant that the experiment had been a success.”

7.06
Arthur Vidich is Frank Olson’s brother-in-law. Their families regularly spent their summer vacation together. Vidich remembers Frank Olson as an American patriot, who was enthusiastic about working for the Army’s biological weapons program.

7.22 Voice of Arthur Vidich/Brother-in-law of Frank Olson
“He was a person who believed in what he was doing, who felt the work that he was doing at the Center in Frederick was important for the United States. He considered himself a terribly loyal and patriotic person. That kind of an attitude of loyalty was one way of expressing your Americanism.”

7.58
Dr. Frank Olson had worked for the US Army’s biological weapons laboratory for exactly ten years when he died in New York in the wee hours of November 28, 1953. He spent the night at the Hotel Pennsylvania, along with a CIA agent who was there to guard him. That night, Frank Olson plunged to his death from his room on the hotel’s thirteenth floor. Through a closed window, it was said.

8.31
“Army Bacteriologist Dies In Plunge From New York Hotel”.

Nils, the youngest of Olson’s three children, scribbled on the clipping with a crayon.

8.43 Voice of Eric Olson:
“I was simply told that ‘Your father has had an accident,’ and that ‘he has died.’ The only detail that I was then given was that he had fallen or jumped out of a window. I remember quite clearly just being quite stupefied by this.

As a nine-year-old I was old enough to have some idea of cause and effect. And I had no idea what does it mean to fall out of a window. How you fall out of a window in the middle of the night. What is that?”

9.20
Eric didn’t understand.

And for his mother, the subject of his father’s death became a taboo.

9.33
The search for the circumstances surrounding the mysterious death of Dr. Frank Olson begins in 1945, with the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau, Germany. American troops discovered the corpses of hundreds of prisoners who had been murdered or starved to death. Many of the survivors told US doctors about cruel experiments the camp’s doctors carried out using disease germs and various drugs.

9.59
A few weeks later, at Kransberg Castle north of Frankfurt, the scientific elite of Nazi Germany is arrested and questioned by American officers. The name of the project is “Operation Dustbin.” The American military hopes to evaluate and exploit the findings German researchers made during the war. Among the prisoners at Kransberg Castle is rocket scientist Professor Hermann Oberth, who collects autographs from his colleagues.

10.33
Also at Kransberg Castle: Some of the leading scientific experts in Nazi Germany had been involved in biological warfare, testing the effects of deadly germs on human beings in Dachau and other concentration camps. One of them was Professor Kurt Blome. Blome was the Third Reich’s Deputy Surgeon General and the man behind German research into biological weapons.

10.55
Blome will be among those charged in the case against concentration camp doctors brought before the military tribunal in Nuremberg. He will face the death penalty.

11.07
In spite of the fact that there is enough evidence against him, Kurt Blome will be acquitted in Nuremberg. The Americans have other plans for him.

11.21 Voice of Professor Kurt Blome: Untertitel // Subtitles
1) I stated publicly and openly that I was a conscientious National Socialist…

2) and a follower of Adolf Hitler.

11.29 Voice of Norman Cournoyer
“We were interested in anyone who did work in biological warfare. Did they want to use that? The Nazis? Yes, absolutely! They wanted to use anything that killed people. Anything!”

11.48
The Americans save Kurt Blome, seen here on the left, from death by hanging. In turn, he provides them with information about the Nazi biological weapons program. One of the specialists interrogating Blome is Donald Falconer, a friend and colleague of Frank Olson. Falconer is responsible for developing anthrax bombs.

12.12
Today, more than 50 years later, Donald Falconer lives in a convalescent home not far from Frederick.

12.22
Eric Olson has visited Falconer several times, hoping his father’s old friend might one day confide a crucial secret in him. But Falconer refuses to say anything, feeling bound by his military oath, and doesn’t want to be interviewed.

12.45
In one of his father film’s, immediately following images of his grandfather, Eric discovers a sequence that seems to show secret crop-dusting flights that took place in 1947. Using the findings of Blome and other Nazi scientists, the Americans experimented with artificial diseases capable of destroying crops.

13.07
After this short clip, more family pictures of the children.

13.15
Meanwhile, in Fort Detrick, a massive arms program is taking place with bacteriological weapons, primarily anthrax spores, which have proven to be highly resistant and therefore suitable for biological warfare.

13.29
Anthrax was cultivated in this building, then placed in bombs. The Americans are concerned about the Soviets’ biological arsenal. If the cold war should ever turn hot, deadly bacteria might be used as weapons. The army demands ample weapons at the ready.

13.50
Frank Olson often uses the Air Force to test germ warfare in the field, for example on the Caribbean island of Antigua. These tests are carried out to monitor the spread of diseases under realistic conditions. Most of the tests Olson’s team carries out in the Caribbean and on the Alaskan tundra deal with relatively harmless bacteria, but some tests are conducted using actual pathogens – called “hot stuff.”

14.20 Voice of Norman Cournoyer:
“We did not use anthrax, we used bacillus globigii which is very similar a spore as Anthrax is. So to that extent we did do something that was not kosher. We picked it up all over. It was picked up months after it.”

14.50
It’s an easy-going life they lead, but they have a secret mission. In California, Olson and his team drive up the Pacific coast in a yellow convertible to prepare an experiment to take place over San Francisco Bay. Spores will be released in order to test the city’s vulnerability to an act of Russian sabotage. Frank Olson loves life and has little interest in following rules. His unconventional manner seems inconsistent with his job working for the army.

15.21
In October of 1949, Olson is suspected of disclosing government secrets. He is interrogated by military intelligence.

15.30
(visual texts) “Olson was mildly impatient with the questioning conducted during the course of this interview. This attitude is regarded as typical by persons at Detrick who are acquainted with him.”

“Olson is violently opposed to control of scientific research, either
military or otherwise, and opposes supervision of his work. He does not follow orders, and has had numerous altercations with MP’s (…)”

15.52 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson:
“He was very, very open and not scared to say what he thought. For that matter to the contrary. He did not give a damn. Frank Olson pulled no punches at any time. And I don’t know. That’s what they were scared of, I am sure. He did speak up any time he wanted to. Was he gonna be caught on this? Could be. Could be.”

16.22
As the scientist responsible for biological warfare experiments, Frank Olson was among the most important holders of confidential information during the Cold War.

November 1953. Four years after he was suspected for disclosing secrets – an accusation that was never proved: During a trip to New York, Olson is accompanied by a CIA agent who watches him constantly, never leaving his side. Olson and the CIA agent take a room in the famous Hotel Pennsylvania. So, what are they doing in New York?

17.00
Armand Pastore is the manager of the hotel. He is on duty that night, when Frank Olson falls from the 13th floor, landing on the sidewalk in front of the hotel.

17.12 Voice of Armand Pastore/Former hotel manager:
“He was laying there looking at me, trying to speak to me, very earnest
look in his eyes, wide open …. but there was blood everywhere: blood from his nose, blood from his eyes, blood from his ears, there was a bone protruding from his left arm, sticking straight out. And I kept trying to speak to him, but we were not really communicating, because I could not understand anything he was saying, and then finally he died.”

17.48
Pastore notifies the police and accompanies them to the 13th floor. In the meantime, he has determined that Olson must have fallen to his death from 1018A, and that there was probably another person in the room at the time.

18.03 Voice of Armand Pastore/Former hotel manager:
“’Wait a minute’, I said, ’it is possible that there is somebody in there’. Then they became alert and they pulled their guns out and said: ’You open the door and we’ll go in.’ I opened the door with my key and they rushed in. Here this guy was sitting in the commode with the hands on his knees, his hands up to his head. The cops said ’what happened’ he said: ’I don’t know, I just heard a crash of glass and I then I see, that Frank Olson is out of the window. And he is down on the street.’”

18.50
The CIA shadow testifies that he was fast asleep and didn’t hear Olson get out of bed. He can offer no explanation for the suicide. He has nothing else to say. He makes no statement regarding the reason the two were visiting New York. The case is closed quickly. No one is interested in the telephone call that was made from Olson’s room immediately following his death.

19.15 Voice of Armand Pastore/Former hotel manager:
“The operator said, ’yes there was one call out of that room’. So I said ‘What was the conversation?’ She said the man in the room called this number out in Long Island and said ‘Well, he’s gone’ and the man on the other end said ’Well, that’s too bad’ and they both hung up.”

19.39
Was that the CIA agent reporting that he had solved the “Frank Olson problem” in the Hotel Pennsylvania?

19.50
Eric Olson in New York. For years now, he has been searching for witnesses who might know something about his father’s death, which he considers to be a murder perpetrated by the CIA. He wants to know the motive. Was the government afraid Frank Olson might reveal state secrets? The recent terror attacks involving anthrax were a shock to Eric.

20.28
Eric finds himself wondering about a lot of things. Was the anthrax terrorist one of our own? Is that the reason he hasn’t been caught? Because he knows something no one else should find out about? A secret his father knew, too?

20.44
In a suburb of New York, Eric Olson meets long-time CIA veteran Ike Feldman. In the fifties, he worked in drug enforcement. At least, that was the official version. Although Feldman never met Eric’s father personally, he discovered some information about the circumstances of his death.

21.07 Voice of Ira (“Ike”) Feldman/Former CIA agent:
“The source that I have was the New York City Police Department, the Bureau of Narcotics Agents and the CIA Agents themselves. They all say the same thing: that he was pushed out of the window and that he did not jump.

People who wanted him out of the way said he talked too much and he was telling people about the things he had done which is American secret. If you work on a top government secret, a city secret, a state secret, and it spills out to people who should not know, there is only one way to do it: kill him.”

21.46
In April of 1950, Dr. Frank Olson received a diplomatic passport, unusual for an army scientist. Did he have a new job? In the following years, he traveled often to Europe, including making several trips to Germany.

22.00 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson:
“He was a member of the CIA. I only found this out after he told me about it. To me he was a Captain. That’s all I knew about it at first. It turned out that he was a CIA agent. And stayed on, right on through to 1953.”

22.28
Pictures taken in Frankfurt and Heidelberg will later turn up among Olson’s slides. These cities were home to the US Army’s most important facilities in Germany. There is also a picture of the top secret CIA headquarters in Germany, located in the building of IG Farben in the heart of Frankfurt.

22.56
What is Olson’s new assignment? He is now working in an area that has nothing to do with biological weapons. Here, in the German offices of the CIA, the biochemist is conducting important conversations with US intelligence officers.

23.17
Increasingly, he can be found in the company of other CIA agents, including a certain John McNulty. It has to do with a top secret project to use chemicals, drugs and torture on human beings in order to break their will and make them submissive. Brainwashing.

23.35
The code name for this operation: Artichoke.

23.43
(Visual text!)
“The (…) team would enjoy the opportunity of applying
“Artichoke” techniques to individuals of dubious loyalty, suspected agents or plants and subjects having known reasons for deception.”

23.56
In Oberursel, in the Taunus hills north of Frankfurt, hidden in old half-timbered houses, the US Army led a quiet interrogation center: “Camp King”. It was primarily Soviet agents and defectors from East Germany who were kept here, people the CIA considered to be communist spies. Special teams, the so-called “rough boys”, interrogated the prisoners.

24.23
Former SS member Franz Gajdosch was hired just after the war by the Americans to tend the bar in the officers’ mess at Camp King. Sometime in the year of 1952, in the top secret interrogation center, Gajdosch runs across another German: Professor Kurt Blome.

24.42 Voice of Franz Gajdosch-dt./ Former barkeeper at “Camp King”:
“For a long time, Blome was a doctor at Camp King, he also ran the clinic. He was a protégé of the Americans, and had been a concentration camp doctor. He conducted experiments.”

25.03
The American officers who lived the good life at Camp King aren’t disturbed about Blome’s past. Was the former concentration camp doctor expected to lend his experience for their own planned experiments on human beings? A CIA consultant began planning the Artichoke experiments as early as September of 1951.

25.24
(Visual text!)
“The conversations at Oberursel pointed up (…) signs
and symptoms of drugs that might be used (…) We should look into the use of amnesia-producing drugs.”

25.34 Voice of Franz Gajdosch-dt./ Former barkeeper at “Camp King”:
“Of course their methods were not humane, they exerted a lot of pressure. There are ways of breaking people. At Camp King, they were notorious, the “rough boys” – anything somebody didn’t want to reveal, they would try to get it out of them.”

26.01
There are many indications that the cruel experiments involving human beings – “Operation Artichoke” – took place in this isolated CIA safe house near Camp King, at the edge of a town called Kronberg.

26.17
The former “Schuster Villa”, now called “Haus Waldhof”, was built shortly after the turn of the century as the summer residence of a Jewish banking family from Frankfurt. The Nazis confiscated it in 1934, and the Americans took it over after the war.

26.33 Voice of Franz Gajdosch-dt./Former bartender at “Camp King”:
“The neighbors, the community didn’t know who it was, what this place was, because the military personnel going in and out of the house weren’t in uniform, they wore civilian clothing. The vehicles had no license tags, so the community wasn’t even aware it was an American facility.”

26.58
At “House Waldhof,” in June 1952, the CIA begins conducting brain-washing experiments, using various drugs, hypnosis, and probably torture. One of the top secret protocols documents a Russian agent being pumped full of medication.

27.19
The goal of the experiments is to manipulate the human mind in order to extract secrets from its subjects. And then to erase their memory, so they can’t remember what happened to them.

27.38
Dr. Frank Olson arrived in Frankfurt on June 12, 1952, from Hendon Military Airport near London. He left the Rhine-Main region three days later, on June 15.

27.53
On June 13, experiments are conducted with “Patient No. 2”, a suspected Soviet double-agent.

28.03 Voice of Norm Cournoyer
“He was troubled after he came back from Germany one time. He came back and told me and he said Norm, I tell you right now you and I never talked about this, but we were both grown-ups and this was rough. He said ‘Norm, you would be stunned by the techniques that they used.’

They made people talk! They brainwashed people! They used all kinds of drugs, they used all kinds of torture.”

28.32
The CIA’s unscrupulous experiments on human beings continued the Nazi drug experiments they learned of during the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp.

28.43 Voice of Norman Cournoyer
“They were using Nazis, they were using prisoners, they were using Russians, and they didn’t care whether they got out of that or not.”

29.17
Meanwhile, the US army was conducting extensive experiments with a new miracle drug: LSD. Here, for example, a soldier was expected to assemble a rifle while under the influence of the hallucinogen.

29.35
The army’s LSD experiments took place on the campus of the Chemical Corps in Edgewood Arsenal. The scientists who worked in these laboratories in the early fifties, and who collaborated closely with Frank Olson, were looking for new hallucinogenic substances. They hoped to find a way to use the drugs on the battle ground.

30.04
Dr. Fritz Hoffmann, a chemist from former Nazi Germany, had been hired a few years earlier to spur the search for new behavior-modifying substances. Immediately after the war he courted the Americans, seeking to ensure a job in the United States.

30:21 Voice of Bennie E. Hackley/Chemical Corps US Army:
“There was an interest in the U.S. during that time in looking at mood-altering drugs from LSD to BZ and other possible mood-altering drugs. Fritz was interested in that area as well.”

30.50
After its experiments on soldiers, the army saw potential in using LSD and other drugs to sedate and “dope” enemy troops. In short order, it would be possible to conquer territory without a fight.

31.15
A short time later, the CIA begins conducting its own LSD experiments in the bohemian New York neighborhood of Greenwich Village, on Bedford Street. But unlike the army experiments, the subjects of these tests, which took place in an apartment disguised as a brothel, would not be informed. The CIA hired prostitutes to pour LSD into their customers’ drinks. And then lure them into revealing secrets.

31.41 Voice of Ira (“Ike”) Feldman/Former CIA agent
“My purpose was to see that we got guys up there we wanted to talk and through other people we got prostitutes to talk to these guys and each prostitutes would put something – which I found out later was LSD – into their drink and made them talk. Either they wanted to talk about narcotics, security or crime. This was all part of the CIA experiments. They called it ‘dirty tricks’”.

32.08
LSD, it was soon learned, was a much more effective way to loosen the tongue than alcohol was.

32.24
Deep Creek Lake in western Maryland, a three-hour drive from Washington. In an isolated vacation house at the edge of the lake, the CIA’s “dirty tricks” department converged here for a meeting with ten of its scientists in November 1953.

32.43
The meeting is about Artichoke. According to the invitation, it was a conference for sports journalists. But in reality, the participants, one of them Frank Olson, were to be placed under the influence of LSD.

32.58
One of the drinks has been spiked. Later, it will be said the CIA was conducting a kind of self test – but without the knowledge of the participants.

33.07 Voice of Ira (“Ike”) Feldman/Former CIA agent:
“I do not think again from what I heard, that he was drugged because he was a security agent. He was drugged because he talked too much.”

33.19
When Frank Olson was later briefed about the LSD experiment, he knew immediately what it meant: They had interrogated him with Artichoke techniques.

33.30 Voice of Eric Olson:
“Friday evening he came home and spent the weekend in this house with my mother, my brother and sister and me and during much of the weekend they sat on the sofa which was just over here. It was a foggy November weekend, as she described it, and they sat here, holding hands and staring out of this big window into the fog, and he described having made something he referred to as a terrible mistake.”

34.01
The CIA brings Olson, accompanied by an agent, to New York. In the hotel they are joined by a doctor working for the secret service, who administers medication. Frank Olson has become a security risk. But it seems the CIA has already found a solution.

34.24
Forty years later, at the Institute for Forensic Sciences at George Washington University. The body of Dr. Frank Olson has been exhumed and is undergoing an autopsy. Eric wants clarity, once and for all. And as it turns out, the results of the first autopsy in 1953 in New York were manipulated.

34.52 Voice of Prof. James Starrs/George Washington University:
“The report from New York City, from the Medical Examiner’s office which I had before me was totally inaccurate in some very important respects. It talks about lacerations, cuts of the flesh that in all probability might have been caused by glass in the course of his fall.

There were no lacerations. They were not there, totally non-existent.

We also noticed immediately that he had a hemorrhage, which we call a hematoma, which is under the skull by the frontal bone. That is only reasonably explainable as having occurred by reason of his being shall we say silenced, being rendered unable to defend himself, so that he could be tossed out of the window.”

35.54
Starrs arranges to visit the Pennsylvania Hotel with Armand Pastore, the hotel manager who found Frank Olson that night. Afterwards, he makes his judgment:

36.05 Voice of Prof. James Starrs/George Washington University:
“It is my view and a number of my team members, not all of them, that it was homicide.”

36.16
That would mean Frank Olson was first knocked out by a targeted blow and then thrown out of the open hotel window. Just a few months before the murder took place, the CIA had this “Study of Assassination” prepared, a how-to book for agents, on how to kill people without leaving any clues. In this report, it says:

36.37
(Visual text!)
“The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. (…) In some cases it will be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him.”

36.49 Voice of Prof. James Starrs/George Washington University:
“What was spelled out in that ‘Assassination Manual’ was almost letter for letter what happened to Doctor Olson and it was a protocol, as we call it, for an assassination, which fit like the fingers in a glove.”

37.10
So was it in fact murder? But for what reason? Why did Olson speak of a “terrible mistake” he had made?

37.24 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson:
“There is a piece missing and I am not sure that I am the one to give it to you. What happened was, that he just got involved in it in a way he was unhappy about it. But there was nothing he could do about it. He was CIA and they took it to the end.”

37.49
Summer 1953. Frank Olson and his father-in-law cut down a tree. Then the family goes to Tupper Lake on vacation. Just like every year. With Arthur Vidich, his wife and their children. Everything seems the same as always. But that appearance is deceiving. Frank is troubled by something. And he makes an attempt to confide in his brother-in-law Art.

38:16 Voice of Arthur Vidich/Brother-in-law of Frank Olson:
“I had never had a conversation with him about anything that might have involved moral values. What had startled me about it was that he had mentioned the Bible and that he was struggling with something. I knew that there was a problem that he was attempting to confront. But what that problem was, I did not know. I can visualize his face actually: It was drawn, in a way I had never seen it before.”

38.58
While the family enjoys summertime at the lake, Frank retreats into his own world.

39:03 Voice of Eric Olson:
“My mother also recalled that my father was short-tempered during that last summer. She knew that he had been going through some kind of crisis. She knew he had not been sleeping well, she knew he wasn’t really at peace. He had been agitated and worried about something and from time to time discussed leaving Detrick, leaving his job and retraining himself as a dentist. She had encouraged him to do this if that is what he wanted to do.”

39.37
In Asia, at that time, a bitter war was going on between allied US troops against the North Koreans and Chinese. It had already been going on for three years. It was the first, long-awaited and long-feared battle between the West and Communism. Could the Korean War have anything to do with Frank’s personal problems?

40.05
He still has an office here in Fort Detrick, in the US army’s center for biological weapons. At the same time, he is working for the CIA. Among the tasks of the dirty tricks department in Building 1412 are brainwashing, drugs and torture, as well as murder by means of poisons and bacteria.

40.27
On July 17, 1953, Olson celebrates his 43rd birthday with friends. A few days later, he leaves for the last trip he will ever take. He took his movie camera.

40.42
First stop: London. First objects filmed: Big Ben and a parade on the Mall.

40.52
Then on to Paris. Near the Eiffel Tower, his two CIA colleagues sit in a sidewalk café and watch pretty French girls go by, on the left is John McNulty.

41.07
“Paris, London, Stockholm”, Frank will later write on the packaging. His son Eric is seeing his father’s last film consciously for the first time.

41.18
Then, suddenly, a picture of the ruins of the Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate. The Soviet Memorial for the Victims of the Second World War. So Frank Olson was also in Berlin early in August 1953.

41.38
In Zehlendorf he photographs the headquarters of the American army.
Is Frank Olson on a secret Artichoke mission? Several top-level communist agents were being interrogated in Berlin at the time. It was a time of intense political and military tension in the divided city, just weeks after the civilian uprising in the Soviet sector. At the army headquarters in Berlin, Olson apparently witnessed brutal interrogation methods.

42.19 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson
“After he came back from Germany the last time he sounded different. When he talked to me he said, I can probably tell you things, that I can’t tell other people, because they are still in top secret material. The people he saw in Germany went to the extreme. He said: ‘Norm, did you ever see a man die?’

I said ‘No.’

He said, ‘Well, I did.’

Yes, they did die. Some of the people they interrogated died. So you can imagine the amount of work they did on these people.”

43.10 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson
“He said, that he was going to leave. He told me that. He said, ‘I am getting out of that CIA. Period’.”

43.19
In Korea, it’s just a matter of days before the first American prisoners of war will be released. Some of them will face charges of high treason, because they accused their own country of conducting biological warfare.

43.31 Voice of US Air Force Pilot (Prisoner of War in North Korea):
“If my son asked me what I did, what I did in Korea, how can I tell him that I came over here and dropped germ bombs on people destroying, and bringing death and destruction. How can I go back and face my family?”

43.48
Are their accusations accurate? Or are they themselves the victims of communist brainwashing? One thing is for certain: Back home, in freedom, the soldiers making these confessions will be interrogated again, using drugs and torture – by their own people!

(Visual text!)
“All hands agreed that (…) among the returning POWs
from Korea (…) the ‘hard core’ group and those who had been successfully indoctrinated were excellent subjects for Artichoke work.”

44.19
The American soldiers who claimed to have committed biological warfare were apparently manipulated using Artichoke techniques. This is documented in CIA papers. And indeed, all discredited their confessions.

44.30 Voice of US Air Force-Pilot (after his return):
“I did sign a confession, relating to germ warfare. The statements contained in this confession were false they were obtained under duress from Chinese communists. When making these statements I deliberately attempted to put in much as was false and ridiculous that I could possibly get away with.”

44.57 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson
“I took an oath when I left the Army that I would not talk about that. I am sorry.”

45.05
The Korean War Memorial in Washington honors the Americans who died in that fight. Of those who returned, some were interrogated by the CIA using cruel methods, and forced to rescind their confessions. But were the confessions the truth? Did the Americans in fact use biological weapons in the Korean War? As a test? And was this the secret Frank Olson knew, and might disclose?

Finally when one my father’s colleagues within the past year only told me that my father had come to understand that Korea was the key thing and that they were using biological warfare methods in Korea.

And then I preceded to ask him about the germ warfare confessions, this was alleged to be by the American government, these confessions made by the American servicemen were immediately discredited by the U.S. government under the idea that these were manipulated and produced only by the effect of brainwashing.

And at that point my father’s colleague looked at me as if to say ‘read-my-lips’: ‘it wasn’t all brainwashing’.”

46.24
Would this colleague, Norman Cournoyer, repeat this statement in front of the camera? He has never made a public statement. Neither about Frank Olson, nor about biological warfare in the Korean War. Will he, now in his 80s, pay last respects to his old friend Frank Olson? And to Frank’s son Eric, who takes part in this conversation?

46.46 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson
“I took an oath when I left the United States Army that I would never divulge that stuff.”

“You divulged it to me.”

“You cannot prove it, can you?”

“I can assert it. You told me.”

“Hearsay!”

“So you don’t want to say it?”

“No …. I don’t want to say it. But, there were people who had biological weapons and they used them. I won’t say anything more than that. They used them.”

47:24 Voice of Norman Cournoyer/Friend of Frank Olson:
“Was there a reason for your Dad being killed by the CIA? Probably so.”

47.44
Around Frederick, Maryland, where Frank Olson lived while working for both the US Army’s secret biological warfare program and the CIA, the FBI is still looking for the anthrax terrorist.

For months, the largest investigation in the history of American criminal justice has been underway. Should the perpetrator be accused and the case come to court, the government in Washington might be forced to reveal what Eric Olson believes is top secret information about illegal research on biological weapons, about the use of anthrax in the Korean War – and about his father’s murder.

48.30
Eric wants to tell his friend Bruce about the latest evidence. Bruce has been at his side throughout his years of research. Once, in the summer of 1975, the American government didn’t hesitate to see to it that the truth was not made known.

48.43
The conspiracy originated at the top, in the White House, initiated by Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney. It had just been learned that the CIA allegedly drugged its employee Frank Olson with LSD before his supposed suicide.

Rumsfeld and Cheney, heads of the White House chiefs of staff, at the time recommended to President Gerald Ford that he apologize to the family in the name of the government, and to support retribution. In order to prevent worse things from happening. That’s the content of this White House memo:

49.21
“There (is…) the possibility that it might be necessary to disclose highly classified national security information in connection with any court suit or legislative hearings.”

49.38
Ten days later, Ford hosted the Olson family and apologized. This allowed him to remain silent about state secrets – and the true reasons for Frank Olson’s death.

49.52 Voice of Eric Olson
“What this means for me is that a national security homicide is not only a possibility, but really it is a necessity, when you have a certain number of ingredients together.

If you are doing top secret work that is immoral, arguably immoral, especially in the post-Nuremberg period, and arguably illegal, and at odds with the kind of high moral position you are trying to maintain in the world, then you have to have a mechanism of security which is going to include murder.”

50.26
The two politicians who collaborated in the conspiracy in 1975, Rumsfeld and Cheney, are back in power. As vice president and secretary of defense of the government of the United States. The Frank Olson case, it seems, is far from being closed, even 50 years later. That, at least, is one thing of which Olson’s son is now certain.

CLOSE

Frederick’s ‘Candidate’ was not Frank Olson, but Frederick itself

Frederick News-Post
August 22, 2004
By Eric Olson

Roy Meachum’s column “Frederick’s ‘Candidate'” (News-Post, Aug. 4) makes a very useful contribution to the burgeoning literature on the death of my father, Dr. Frank Olson. Meachum’s column becomes even more informative when combined with the two long articles by Scott Shane on Detrick’s Special Operations Division and on the Olson case that ran in the “Baltimore Sun” three days earlier, on August 1.

Meachum does an excellent job of sketching the context of my father’s work at Detrick and the CIA, his objections to biological warfare, and the Cold War climate in which the whole saga unfolded and in which his 1953 murder must be understood.

However, in discussing this history in relation to “The Manchurian Candidate” movies, both the new and the old versions, Meachum inadvertently adds to the confusion.

Why has it taken half a century to arrive at the truth about what happened to Frank Olson?

What Meachum doesn’t say is that “The Manchurian Candidate” has been a large part of the problem.

The notion of a “Manchurian Candidate,” the idea that someone could be programmed to make statements or commit actions contrary to their own will, bears a very complicated relationship to the Frank Olson story.

Actually “Manchuria” conjoins exactly the two disparate ideas — biological weapons and mind control — that initially seem such unlikely bedfellows in the Frank Olson story.

Manchuria is the area in northeast China directly north of North Korea where, beginning in 1932, the Japanese began an intense program of research in biological warfare. Detrick was established a decade later during World War II as a response to the infamous Japanese BW program in Manchuria (“Unit 731”) which used thousands of Chinese as live, human guinea pigs for biological warfare experimentation. One of Detrick’s early scientific directors told me that the impetus to get the United States into biological warfare research was driven much more by what the Japanese were doing in Manchuria than by what the Nazis were doing in Germany.

The second notion in the Frank Olson story, that of mind control, enters the picture during the Korean War, when captured American GI’s were taken to Manchuria for what the Chinese called “thought reform,” the strenuous program of interrogation popularly called “brainwashing.”

While still in captivity in Manchuria some of the captured American pilots made statements that became known as “germ warfare confessions.” In these statements the pilots said they had dropped biological weapons on North Korea.

When they returned to the States these same pilots made statements recanting their former confessions. They now claimed that their earlier statements had been made under the duress of psychological manipulation and torture. Available documents indicate that a Detrick-CIA interrogation program called “Artichoke” with which my father was involved had “debriefed” these POWs prior to their recantations.

The experience of American GIs imprisoned in Manchuria became the basis of Richard Condon’s 1959 novel, “The Manchurian Candidate,” and then of the 1962 film by the same name. The novel and the film then supplied the name for John Marks’ 1979 nonfiction work on CIA mind-control experiments, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. A long chapter on Frank Olson, called “The Case of Dr. Frank Olson” forms the centerpiece of that book. (This chapter and many other materials are available on the Frank Olson website at www.frankolsonproject.org.)

John Marks’ chapter, combined with the spin that was put on the story of my father’s death by the CIA in 1975, formed the basis for the public’s belief that Frank Olson committed suicide after being drugged with LSD in a secret CIA experiment. It is this version of the story that has required another quarter of a century to deconstruct, as Meachum explains.

What Meachum does not explain is that the spurious link of Frank Olson’s death to the whole notion of mind control and LSD — in short the link to the Manchurian scenario — was actually a major stumbling block in arriving at a lucid account of what really happened.

At the time of his death my father’s colleagues at Detrick were informed that Frank Olson had been an unwitting participant in a drug experiment, and that this caused the psychological reaction that led to his taking his own life ten days later. His closest colleagues knew that this explanation was not the true reason for his death. Many others at Detrick were highly skeptical to say the least. But the notion of an LSD suicide provided at least a placeholder to quiet rumors and suspicions, even as it left room for the message that was being sent by security to all the personnel at Detrick: potential whistle-blowers will be dealt with harshly.

Fifty years later old-timers at Detrick are still reduced to quivering jelly at the mention of the name “Frank Olson.”

The story those colleagues were given in 1953 is the one that the public received in 1975 when the Rockefeller Commission released the news that an unnamed scientist had been drugged with LSD in 1953 and then plunged to his death.

This story of my father’s death as it was experienced by insiders was brought up to date for me in 2001 when one of my father’s closest Detrick colleagues and friends told me what he knew about the events that preceded my father’s death. This colleague explained that my father had become alarmed both by terminal experiments and interrogations that were being conducted by American forces in Europe using Detrick-CIA techniques, and also by the use of biological weapons in Korea.

When my father’s colleague told me about the use of biological weapons in Korea, I responded by saying. “Yes, but what about the claim that those allegations were the result of brainwashing?”

As if he were stunned by my naïveté, this colleague looked into my eyes said, “It wasn’t all brainwashing. Get it?”

“It wasn’t all brainwashing. Get it?”

In its disinformation wars the CIA did not hesitate to use whatever arrows it had in its quiver, including the claim of brainwashing, in the service of what it called “psychological discrediting.”

What my father’s colleague was telling me was that this discrediting technique had been used to neutralize the “germ warfare confessions.”

The LSD drugging story was used with similar effect to neutralize suspicions that my father had been murdered for security reasons.

This complex story is told in detail in the 2002 documentary film on the Frank Olson story “Code Name Artichoke”which has now been shown internationally in many countries and in the United States on Link-TV. Copes of the film on VHS or DVD are available from Satellite Video in Walkersville.

The essential point is this: it is necessary to insert the notion of “psychological discrediting” into the Manchurian Candidate scenario as it applies to the Frank Olson story. It then becomes clear that the real target of mind control was not Frank Olson. Frank Olson was killed the old fashioned way. He was simply knocked on the head and thrown out the window, as the CIA’s assassination manual suggests (and as Roy Meachum asserts).

The real target of mind control was the public to whom the story of a suicidal, deranged, drugged scientist would be told. That story was so shocking and sensational that, even though it didn’t hold together, nearly thirty more years have been required to shake it loose.

In understanding this phenomenon of directed misperception the most pertinent literary source is not “The Manchurian Candidate,” but, rather, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” What that classic story illustrates is the power of authority to establish a perceptual illusion among a public who are instructed to see things in a certain way. No one in H.C. Anderson’s story, except a small child, has the courage to break ranks and point out that the emperor is stark naked.

In that sense the real Frederick Candidate, the real subject of brainwashing and mind control, was not Frank Olson. It was Frederick itself.

– Eric Olson, PhD

CLOSE

Acid Drop

By Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen

Revised, updated, and expanded.A Citadel Press Book
January 2004
(Used with the permission of the authors.)

No one saw Frank Olson plunge to his death from the 13th story of New York’s Statler Hotel. No one, at any rate, willing to admit it. Not the man from the CIA who was in room 1018A with Olson when the 43-year-old biochemist and father of three crashed through a closed, shuttered window and tumbled to the cold sidewalk below. To believe the CIA man, he either awoke in his bed some time after midnight to see his roommate charge the window and throw himself through the thick plate-glass; or, as he told it on another occasion, he awoke after Olson had already defenestrated, startled from sleep by the sound of shattering glass.

The CIA man with the shifting story was Robert Lashbrook, deputy to the spy agency’s wizard of mind-control and exotic assassinations. Despite its many inconsistencies, the CIA account of what happened during the early morning hours of November 28, 1953 would become the official story of Frank Olson’s death: It was an unfortunate suicide triggered by a small dose of Lycergic Acid Diethylamide – LSD – secretly administered to Olson in a mind-control experiment gone awry.

Fifty years after the fact, conventional history records Dr. Frank Olson’s death as perhaps the most infamous repercussion of MK-ULTRA, the CIA’s illegal quest to “modify an individual’s behavior by covert means” using hypnosis, electroshock treatment and psychotropic drugs such as LSD. According to this interpretation, Olson’s fatal fall was the result of a “bad trip,” a tragic, yet accidental, consequence of the CIA’s Cold War wet dream of developing a magical brainwashing elixir.
But could the Frank Olson story have an even simpler, albeit darker, explanation? Is it possible that the accidental death scenario – however embarrassing to the CIA at the time of its disclosure during the mid-1970s — served as a cover story to conceal a more disturbing truth? To wit: Was Frank Olson deliberately assassinated?

Two decades after the bizarre tragedy, Olson’s eldest son, Eric, would begin to dispute the official account. His search for answers would ultimately span the course of three decades, becoming a personal obsession that would drain his finances, upend his relationships, and derail his once promising career as a Harvard-trained psychologist. No obstacle would deter him from his mission, not even the taboo of unearthing his father’s bones. (The Shakespearean parallels weren’t lost on the scholarly Eric; “think Hamlet,” he liked to say, “but on the order of years, not months.”) Eventually, Eric would uncover tantalizing evidence suggesting that his father, far from being the victim of a “drug experiment gone awry,” may have been murdered as the proverbial man who knew too much.

Yet in the aftermath of that ill-fated Thanksgiving weekend in 1953, and for a numbing 22 years afterward, the Olson family had been given no explanation at all for Frank Olson’s mysterious death.

It was still dark outside when two grim visitors arrived at the Olson house in Frederick, Maryland, two days after Thanksgiving. Alice Olson roused her nine-year-old son, Eric, from bed and led him into the living room. The sleepy boy immediately recognized the two men as the family doctor and Lt. Col. Vincent Ruwet, his father’s boss at U.S. Army Camp Detrick, just down the road from the Olson home.

Ruwet delivered the terrible news: Alice’s husband was dead. Earlier that morning, Frank Olson had “fallen or jumped,” as Ruwet put it, from the window of a New York City hotel room. Calling it a “work-related accident,” Ruwet explained that the family would be eligible for government compensation. (In the compensation form he subsequently filed on behalf of the family, Ruwet wrote that Olson had died of a “classified illness.”)

Exactly what kind of work Olson had been engaged in at the time of his “accident” wasn’t a part of the morning’s ad hoc grief counseling. Alice, a 38-year-old housewife, had only a vague knowledge of her husband’s classified work at Camp Detrick, where he was director of planning and evaluations in the Army Chemical Corps’ Special Operations Division (SOD). She knew that as a biochemist, Frank Olson’s specialty during World War II had been the airborne delivery of biological toxins and bacteria, including anthrax. Before the end of the war, a painful stomach ulcer had forced Olson to seek a medical discharge from the Army. But he had stayed on at Camp Detrick as a civilian scientist.

In consoling the Olsons, Ruwet made no mention of the nature of the work at Detrick. Nor did he ever mention LSD or the CIA.

As Eric struggled to absorb the devastating news, Alice composed herself enough to tell her two other children, seven-year-old Lisa and five-year-old Nils, that their father would not be coming home. Compounding the family’s sense of shock was the seeming improbability of the tragedy. That Frank Olson had taken his own life just didn’t square with the devoted husband and caring father they knew. It made no sense. And in the absence of a reasonable explanation – the missing how and why – a kind of numbness began to set in. As Eric would later recall, “In that moment when I learned that my father had gone out a window and died, it was as if the plug were pulled from some central basin of my mind and a vital portion of my consciousness drained out.”

Yet Alice knew that her husband had been troubled by something of late. A deeply moral and religious man, Frank Olson had been grappling with an ethical dilemma related to his work. Whenever a group of lab monkeys died upon completion of a successful experiment, Olson had come home depressed and withdrawn. At one point, he had said to his wife rather enigmatically, “If the Germans had won the Second World War, my colleagues and I would have been prosecuted for war crimes.”

The casket, draped with an American flag, remained closed at the funeral four days later. The government explained to the family that even though the body had been embalmed, it was badly disfigured from the fall. Among the mourners at the ceremony were two CIA men: Robert Lashbrook – the man from room 1018A – and his boss, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, architect of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program and the spy agency’s mastermind of bizarre assassination techniques employing lethal biological agents ranging from anthrax to shellfish toxin.

As the coffin was lowered into the ground, the CIA men might have felt an odd sense of relief. After all, the mystery of what killed Frank Olson – and, perhaps, who killed him – was buried on that day along with the body.

The mystery would remain underground – literally — for the next 22 years. In the absence of “closure,” the Olsons’ personal trauma would also remain buried, in a state of unspoken denial. As Eric would later explain, “So great was the shock experience by the family that we did not grieve our loss at all; it was as if nothing had happened.” But as they often do, calm surfaces belied turbulent undercurrents. By the 1960s, Alice had developed a drinking problem that eventually led to the loss of her job as a teacher and a drunk driving arrest on Christmas Eve. Unable to broach the subject of their father’s death with their mother, the Olson children were left to grapple with a legacy of shame and pain. To their friends, they would explain that their father had died of a “fatal nervous breakdown.”

It was long after the Olson children had grown up – and Alice had recovered from alcoholism — that the ghost of the father returned. On June 11, 1975, startling new details turned up on Alice Olson’s front doorstep, in the morning edition of The Washington Post. A front-page story headlined “Suicide Revealed” zeroed in on a sensational item from the just-released report of the Rockefeller Commission, the first of the post-Watergate inquiries into CIA misdeeds. According to the report, an “Army scientist” had leaped to his death from the 13th floor of a New York City hotel room in 1953 after being dosed with LSD by the CIA.

Though the report didn’t name the victim, the family recognized their father in the details. A check with Ruwet confirmed it.

According to the report in the Post – based on the official findings of an internal CIA investigation conducted after the incident – a “civilian employee” of the Army had been dosed with LSD during a government retreat in western Maryland. As the Rockefeller Commission summarized, “This individual was not made aware he had been given LSD until about 20 minutes after it had been administered. He developed serious side effects and was sent to New York with a CIA escort for psychiatric treatment. Several days later, he jumped from a tenth-floor window of his room and died as a result.” (Actually, Room 1018A was on the 13th floor.)

In the weeks following the Post story, no one from the government bothered to contact the Olsons. Frustrated and understandably indignant, the family – and their lawyers — held a press conference in the back yard of the home in Frederick. Now the bizarre story had a face and a name, and journalists flocked to the event. Eric, by then a 31-year-old graduate student working toward a Ph.D in clinical psychology at Harvard, recalls brushing elbows with the likes of Rolling Stone magazine’s Hunter S. Thompson and Leslie Stahl of CBS News. The Olsons took turns reading from a family statement demanding full disclosure from the government. “We feel our family has been violated by the CIA in two ways,” Eric declared. “First, Frank Olson was experimented on illegally and negligently. Second, the true nature of his death was concealed for twenty-two years. … In telling our story, we are concerned that neither the personal pain this family has experienced nor the moral and political outrage we feel be slighted.”

That evening and the following day stories about Frank Olson and his family dominated network news broadcasts and newspaper headlines. Suddenly, information so long denied the Olson family began to dribble in. Two days after the press conference, a man named Armand Pastore contacted the family. In 1953, Pastore had been the night manager at the Statler Hotel. He explained that at around 2 a.m. on November 28 of that year, a panicky busboy had summoned Pastore out to the sidewalk in front of the hotel. Lying on the pavement, bloodied and broken, was Frank Olson. Looking up 13 floors, Pastore saw a dangling blind flapping through an open window frame. Amazingly, Olson was still alive. “He was trying to mumble something,” Pastore later told reporters, “but I couldn’t make it out. It was all garbled, and I was trying to get his name.” Pastore called for a priest and an ambulance. By the time the ambulance arrived, Olson was dead.

Pastore recalled that immediately after the incident someone had made a phone call from Olson’s hotel room to a number in Long Island. According to the hotel switchboard operator, who had listened in, it was a short conversation consisting of only two lines:

“Well, he’s gone,” a man in the hotel room had said.

“That’s too bad,” a man on the other end of the line had replied, before hanging up.

Pastore told Alice Olson that he had always been disturbed by the “unusual circumstances” of her husband’s death. As he later elaborated to reporters, “In all my years in the business, I never encountered a case where someone in the middle of the night jumped through a closed window with the shades and curtains drawn.”

Pastore wasn’t the only interested party to take note of the recent news headlines. Less than two weeks after their backyard press conference, the Olsons were summoned to White House for a personal meeting with President Ford. In the Oval Office, Ford offered the family an official government apology. In a photograph taken during the 1975 meeting, Alice Olson and her grown-up children – Eric, 30; Nils, 27; and Lisa, 29 – look at ease and, more to the point, relieved, as they stand with the president. At the time, it must have been a reassuring, and even heady, experience. After years of government silence on the subject of Frank Olson’s death, the family had finally achieved recognition – and, most importantly, a promise of full disclosure.

The Olsons had been considering legal action, but White House attorneys advised the family against it, telling them, Eric Olson recalls, that “the law was not on our side.” Instead, the government lawyers promised that the White House would support a private bill in Congress to pay the family a settlement. The family signed a waiver releasing the CIA from liability, and in return the Olsons were eventually awarded $750,000 in compensation. The family decision not to file suit, made in deference to Alice Olson’s desire to bring the 22-year ordeal to closure, would prove to be a mistake.

Yet at the time, the family believed that full disclosure was finally at hand. Five days after the Oval Office session, the Olson family met with CIA Director William Colby at the spy agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Over a lavish multi-course luncheon in the Director’s dining room adjacent to his 7th-floor office, Colby offered the Olsons his apologies. The meeting was as awkward as the food was elegant. In his memoirs Colby later referred to the encounter as “one of the most difficult assignments I have ever had.” At the end of the hour, the CIA chief gave the family an inch-thick file of declassified documents, calling it the complete dossier on the death of Frank Olson.

Though heavily redacted, the file fleshed out the narrative bones of the Washington Post story. On November 19, 1953, Olson had joined nine colleagues for a three-day working retreat at Deep Creek Lodge, a rustic cabin in the secluded woods of western Maryland. Five of the attendees were SOD men from Camp Detrick, including Olson and his boss Ruwet. The remaining four were CIA officers from the Technical Services Staff (TSS), commonly known inside the Agency as the “dirty tricks department.” The official purpose of the gathering was to discuss MK-NOAMI, a top-secret joint program of the SOD and TSS to develop germ weapons to infect enemy spies in the field. To maintain absolute secrecy, the participants had been instructed to remove all Camp Detrick tags from their automobiles, and to adopt the occupational “camouflage” of sports journalists.

Assisted by his deputy Lashbrook, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, head of the TSS Chemical Division, led the sessions in the lodge’s chestnut-paneled living room, opposite a roaring fire in a stone hearth. A brilliant chemist with personality tics numerous enough to satisfy a novelist’s appetite for the aberrant (Norman Mailer and Barbara Kingsolver have immortalized him in their fiction), Gottlieb at the time had not yet been dubbed “the CIA’s Dr. Strangelove.” But a few decades of diligent work – and a congressional inquiry or two – would eventually remedy that oversight.

Born with two clubfeet, Gottlieb spent much of his life almost compulsively adapting himself to the external world. According to a cousin, in the hospital when the blanket covering his feet was removed, his mother screamed. Unable to walk, he spent his earliest years in her arms. As a child, he underwent foot surgery three times. Although he remained handicapped for life, he compensated by teaching himself to become a graceful square dancer. A habitual stutterer, Gottlieb exhibited the same zeal for self-improvement and personal reinvention in every other aspect of his life. He excelled in his studies and eventually earned a doctoral degree in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology.

After joining the CIA in 1951, he quickly proved himself to be an ardent Cold War patriot. As his CIA recruiter later noted, “He always had a certain amount of ‘guilt’…about not being able to be in the service during World War II like all his contemporaries because of his clubfoot, so he gave an unusual amount of patriotic service to make up for that.” Working in the CIA’s chemical group, he impressed his superiors as a resourceful, inventive administrator.

By early 1953, Gottlieb had been given control of the Agency’s newly minted mind-control program, MK-ULTRA. At the same time, he ran the research efforts into germ warfare being conducted out of Camp Detrick. Later, he would become the CIA’s expert in better assassination through chemistry. Some colleagues saw Gottlieb, in his single-minded ardor for his work, as a something of a “wild man.”

In less than a year on the job as steward of MK-ULTRA, Gottlieb had already established a rather wild and arguably unscientific methodology that involved dosing unsuspecting CIA men at Langley with LSD and then watching them freak out. According to the official CIA account, Gottlieb performed the same experiment on the men at Deep Creek Lodge.

After dinner on the second night, Gottlieb or one of his CIA men secretly slipped LSD into seven glasses of Cointreau liqueur. If Gottlieb and Lashbrook are to be believed, each of the seven men received a relatively modest dose of 70 micrograms. (Ten years later, Hollywood luminaries such as Cary Grant and James Coburn would regularly ingest doses of 200 micrograms under the supervision of a handful of Los Angeles psychiatrists who briefly dabbled in LSD therapy.) The meeting quickly devolved into laughter and random psychedelic incoherence, and by various accounts several of the men grew uneasy. Olson reportedly had the worst trip. As the biochemist’s SOD colleague Ben Wilson would later tell author John Marks, “Olson was psychotic. He couldn’t understand what happened. He thought someone was playing tricks on him.”

Olson and several others spent a sleepless night under the effects of the drug. The next morning, their nerves frayed, the men decided to adjourn early. When Olson returned home, Alice found her husband to be uncharacteristically withdrawn. After a silent dinner, he told his wife he had made a “terrible mistake” at the retreat. He refused to elaborate, and he didn’t mention anything about Gottlieb drugging him.

Over the weekend, Olson remained quiet and emotionally remote, his thoughts as impenetrable as the dense November fog that hung over the landscape outside. He and Alice spent much of that weekend sitting on the couch, holding hands, quietly looking out the window at the obscuring mist. At one point, Alice asked her husband whether he had falsified information. He said he hadn’t. When Alice asked if he had broken security, Olson replied, “You know I would never do that.” Although he revealed little more, he did tell his wife that he planned to resign his job and retrain himself as a dentist. Alice said that if he felt it was necessary, she would support his decision.

On Sunday night, Frank and Alice Olson took in a movie, Martin Luther, the just-released biopic on the 16th-century Protestant reformer. As Alice would later note, it wasn’t the best choice of movies, given her husband’s mood. The film, which chronicles Luther’s struggles against moral corruption in the Catholic Church and his ultimate break with Catholicism, greatly upset Olson. At the end of the film, Luther nails his 95 theses to the door of the castle church in Whittenburg, officially severing his ties to the Catholic Church.

Early the next morning, Frank Olson appeared in his boss’s office to tender his resignation. Lt. Col. Ruwet reassured Olson that he had done nothing wrong at the retreat, and persuaded his employee to stay on. But the next morning, Olson, still agitated, was back in Ruwet’s office determined to quit. According to Ruwet, Olson said he felt “all mixed up” and questioned his own ability to perform his duties. Ruwet decided that Olson needed “psychiatric attention.” But instead of sending him to the base hospital, Ruwet called Lashbrook at the CIA.

Lashbrook and Gottlieb hastily made arrangements for Olson to see Dr. Harold Abramson, a New York M.D. and allergist who had parlayed a fascination with behavior-modifying drugs into lucrative MK-ULTRA contract work. (In one of his “experiments,” Abramson had dosed goldfish with LSD to see their reaction.) The fact that Abramson was not a psychiatrist apparently didn’t bother Gottlieb, who later sought to justify the peculiar patient referral on national security grounds, that last refuge of panicky civil servants: Abramson, who had considerable experience dosing himself and others with LSD on behalf of the CIA, was already vetted for secrecy.

Ruwet phoned Alice on Tuesday morning to tell her that he and a colleague were taking her husband to New York for treatment because they were “concerned that Frank might become violent with you.” According to Eric, this statement “completely shocked my mother, because she had seen no indications of anything remotely like violent tendencies.” Eric now believes that Ruwet was lying, in an effort to frighten Alice and thereby “preempt the possibility that she might object in any way to their plans.” Later that day, Alice drove with her husband to Washington, D.C., where he was to catch a flight to New York with Ruwet and Lashbrook. The couple stopped for lunch at a coffee shop just outside the Capitol, but Olson wouldn’t touch his coffee. “I can’t drink this,” he said. He grew anxious that someone might have tampered with the beverage, a not entirely paranoid concern given his earlier secret LSD dosing. A half-hour later, Frank Olson boarded a flight to New York. It was the last time Alice would ever see him.

According to the CIA file, Olson saw Abramson for the first time later that day. By then, Olson had become increasingly “paranoid,” as the CIA report put it, and was convinced that the Agency was putting Benzadrine or some other stimulant into his coffee to keep him awake.

The next day, Lashbrook and Ruwet took Olson to the home of John Mulholland, a professional magician whom the TSS had hired to write a manual adapting “the magician’s art to covert activities.” Gottlieb had tasked Mulholland with developing sleight-of-hand techniques that CIA agents could use to slip drugs into drinks. Although Lashbrook later asserted that he was only trying to amuse Olson, the visit had an opposite effect – it freaked him out. If anyone had wanted to unhinge a guy already convinced that he was being drugged against his will, they probably couldn’t have done better than to commission an impromptu magic show by a known conjurer of CIA mickey fins.

Cutting the visit with Mulholland short, Lashbrook and Ruwet hustled Olson back to Abramson’s Long Island office. The CIA allergist talked to Olson for about an hour, then gave him permission to spend Thanksgiving with his family. Olson and his two escorts had an evening to kill before their flight back to Washington the next morning, so the trio took in a Rogers & Hammerstein musical. But Olson became agitated during the first act, believing, according to Ruwet, that people were waiting outside the theater to arrest him. Ruwet took Olson back to the Statler hotel. That night while he slept in the adjacent bed, Olson slipped out of the room and wandered the streets of New York. According to Ruwet, Olson proceeded to tear up his paper money and throw his wallet away, purportedly under the delusion that he was following orders. Ruwet and Lashbrook claimed to have found Olson sitting in the Statler lobby early the next morning.

In Ruwet and Lashbrook’s version of events, the three flew back to Washington later that morning. However, during the drive from National Airport back to Frederick, Maryland, Olson purportedly grew alarmed. If Ruwet is to be believed, Olson said he was “ashamed” to see his family in his present condition, and worried that he might become violent with his children. Lashbrook supposedly contacted Gottlieb, interrupting his boss’s Thanksgiving dinner, and the CIA men decided it would be best to take Olson back to Abramson in New York. Ruwet agreed to return to Frederick and notify the family that Frank Olson wouldn’t be coming home for the holiday.

Later that day, Lashbrook escorted Olson to Abramson’s office, and the non-shrink finally decided to get Olson qualified professional help. According to the CIA’s version of events, Olson agreed to check himself into Chestnut Lodge, a Maryland sanitarium staffed by psychiatrists who allegedly had special security clearance. (In fact, Eric Olson would later discover that the doctors at Chestnut Lodge had no special security clearance, a fact that begs the question, Why did the CIA lie about this?) . According to Lashbrook, he and Olson were unable to get a departing flight until the weekend, so they settled for Thanksgiving dinner at a Horn & Hardart Automat, then checked into room 1018A of the Statler Hotel.

At some point on Friday – the last day of Frank Olson’s life — Abramson showed up at the hotel with a bottle of bourbon and the sedative Nembutol. To say the least, it was an odd prescription for a man who already believed – irrationally or not — that the CIA was trying to drug him. The CIA report offers no more details about Olson’s doings on that Friday. However, we do know that Olson called his wife on Friday evening. It was the first time they had spoken in three days, and Alice was relieved to discover that his mood had improved (a state of mind in stark contrast to the angst-ridden portrait depicted by the CIA). They spoke for several minutes, and Olson told his wife that he was looking forward to seeing her and the kids the next day. By 2 a.m. Saturday morning, just hours after the phone call, and hours before his scheduled flight back to Washington, Olson was dead.

When police arrived on the scene, they found Lashbrook sitting on the toilet in room 1018A, cradling his head in his hands. The CIA man immediately began to tell lies. First, he claimed that he worked for the Defense Department. Then he insisted he had no clue as to why Olson jumped, but added, irrelevantly, that the dead man had “suffered from ulcers.” Police initially suspected a homicide with homosexual overtones, but they dropped the matter after Ruwet and Abramson backed Lashbrook’s account and hinted at classified government connections.

While the CIA’s Office of Security went to work scrubbing New York clean of any telltale evidence linking Olson’s death to the Agency, Lashbrook and Abramson got their own cover stories straight. Lashbrook dictated the specifics of Olson’s alleged psychiatric symptoms while Abramson took notes. Lashbrook went so far as to claim that Alice Olson had urged her husband to seek psychiatric help months before the LSD dosing – a bald-faced lie, according to Alice.

Despite Lashbrook’s pathetic attempts to deflect blame by trumping up a bogus psychiatric history for Olson, CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick officially (but secretly) concluded that Olson’s “suicide” had been “triggered” by the LSD dosing. Kirkpatrick recommended stern censures for Gottlieb and his immediate TSS superiors, but CIA Director Allen Dulles interceded, reducing the reprimand to a weak hand-slap that did no harm to Gottlieb’s career as the Agency’s Cold War alchemist.

Although the CIA documents that Colby had given the Olson family filled in some missing details, it raised as many questions as it purported to answer. In fact, the New York Times called the file “elliptical, incoherent, and contradictory.” It was, the newspaper concluded, “a jumble of deletions, conflicting statements [and] unintelligible passages.” For one thing, despite LSD’s tendency to provoke mercurial responses in distressed individuals, Olson’s bad trip – a week-long psychosis escalating to suicide – seemed out of proportion to the small dose he supposedly swallowed. Then there were several contradictory statements made by Abramson in the report. In one memo, he wrote that Olson’s “psychotic state…seemed to have been crystallized by [the LSD] experiment.” But in another document, he characterized the LSD dose as “therapeutic,” and an amount that “could hardly have had any significant role in the course of events that followed.

Even more puzzling were the report’s numerous references – with all details blacked out — to the CIA’s Project ARTICHOKE. As the precursor to MK-ULTRA, ARTICHOKE concerned the search for a “truth drug” to aid in interrogation. But the top-secret program had also involved other interrogation methods, including torture and attempts to induce amnesia in “blown agents” who knew too much. If Frank Olson’s death was indeed the unintended result of an MK-ULTRA experiment – as the report concluded — then why all the cryptic references in the document to ARTICHOKE?

Unanswered questions or not, the family wanted to believe – needed to believe — that vindication and justice had prevailed. It was time to move on. But, it seemed, the curse of the past wouldn’t let go. In 1976, Eric’s sister Lisa, her husband, and her two-year-old son took off from Frederick in a small plane, bound for the Adirondacks, where they planned to invest Lisa’s share of the settlement money in a lumber mill. The plane crashed and no one survived.

That same year, Eric moved to Sweden, the birth country of his father’s parents, hoping to put some distance between himself and the family curse. In Stockholm, he worked to develop the psychotherapeutic technique he had begun at Harvard: the “collage method,” a process that involved clipping pictures and pasting them into photomontages. Eric found that when patients assembled a collection of nonverbal images in a tableau, they often gained powerful insight into suppressed emotions and memories. (Eric’s own collages often featured images of men tumbling from buildings.) He believed that the collage method might provide a “whole new conceptual base for psychotherapy.” During what would become a decade-long sabbatical in Sweden, Eric fathered a son, Stephan, with a woman he did not marry.

But his new life abroad offered little insulation from the past. Ironically, Eric’s retreat to a “neutral and very quiet country” only sharpened his resolve to exorcise the old family ghosts. “Sweden gave me a great deal of distance from the whole CIA business,” he explained. “And it was precisely the new-found calm which enabled me to see that, objectively, the CIA’s version of events made no sense. My effort was not to hold on to the issue, but to put it behind me. The problem was that every time I turned over another rock, I discovered another snake.”

The serpents were in the details. In his spare time Eric continued his labors to “decode” the meaning of the Colby documents. It was a process not unlike the collage method – piecing together seemingly fragmentary data, but often uncovering deeper or hidden connections.

Back home in the United States, some of those deeper connections had begun to surface on their own. In late 1975, summoned by the U.S. Senate, Sidney Gottlieb returned from semi-retirement as a hospital volunteer in India (he dedicated the latter portion of his life to charitable pursuits, almost as if doing penance for earlier sins). In secret testimony before the Senate Church Committee on Assassinations, the former CIA chemist admitted to his key role in CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders. In 1960, for instance, Gottlieb himself had hand-delivered an “assassination kit” to the CIA station chief in the Congo, with instructions that it be used to eliminate Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. The kit consisted of a lethal toxin – possibly anthrax — concealed in a tube of toothpaste. When the Church Committee published its findings, Eric realized that Gottlieb had been involved in work much darker than mere “experimental drugging.”

In 1978, an even bigger shocker surfaced: In his memoir, former CIA chief William Colby admitted that Frank Olson was more than an “Army scientist,” as the official story claimed. At the time of his death, in fact, Olson had been a full-fledged “CIA employee,” and a “CIA officer.”

Clearly, in its post-mortem investigation, the CIA had attempted to conceal the fact that Olson was one of its own. But why? Eric wondered. Ransacking the Colby documents for the umpteenth time, Eric stumbled upon a new, possibly telling clue. One of the reports submitted by Abramson, the CIA allergist, described the drugging at Deep Creek Lodge as “an experiment [that] had been done to trap” Frank Olson. This description of the fateful session as a “trap” obviously contradicted the official CIA story that Olson had been one of seven human guinea pigs in a simple LSD experiment. Given the many references in the Colby document to ARTICHOKE, Eric began to wonder if the Deep Creek dosing had been part of an interrogation targeting his father.

In 1984, Eric returned to the United States. His first order of business was to visit room 1018A at the Statler Hotel (by that time, renamed the Pennsylvania Hotel). Standing in the tiny room, Eric was struck by the physical impossibility of the official scenario. There wasn’t room enough for a running start, and the window sill was high and blocked by a radiator. Says Eric: “I knew that my father couldn’t have jumped out through that closed hotel window even if he wanted to.”

That same year Eric, Nils and Alice paid a visit to Sidney Gottlieb at his secluded farmhouse in Rappahannock County, Virginia. The 66-year-old former master assassin was now devoted to two of his presumably less lethal passions, goat farming and communal living. He greeted the Olsons warily. “Oh my God,” he said. “I’m so relieved to see you all don’t have a gun.” The night before, he told them, he had dreamed that the Olsons had shot him dead. The family wanted answers, but Gottlieb, true to his espionage training, was evasive. He said that he regretted the incident, but denied that Olson was pushed out the window. At the end of the meeting Gottlieb snapped to Eric, “I can see you’re still wrapped up in your father’s death. I recommend that you join a support group for children whose parents have committed suicide.”

The family also called on Lashbrook, by then retired, at his home in Ojai, California. Eric recalls that Lashbrook was uncommunicative and nervous, claiming to have forgotten key details. The one useful item he revealed was that Gottlieb had been with Olson in New York the week before he died – a fact Gottlieb had failed to mention.

If the CIA’s cult of secrecy remained the proverbial immovable object, by the early 1990s Eric had become its unstoppable force. Eric’s avocation had become a fixation that had eclipsed his career; having returned to the United States for good, he gave up his work as a clinical psychologist to focus full-time on his father’s case. To bankroll his investigation, he became adept in the art of nonprofit fundraising. But he also borrowed money from friends and family, maxed out half a dozen credit cards, and began to sink into debt. Personal relationships faltered. Friction grew between Eric and brother Nils, a successful dentist who had helped Eric financially in his quest, but who now worried that Eric had gone off the deep end.

Concern for his mother, who by the early 1990s had developed pancreatic cancer, held Eric back from taking the next logical step in his investigation. But after Alice died in 1993, Eric, with the consent of Nils, decided to exhume his father’s body. In June 1994, 41 years after Frank Olson’s burial, Eric watched as a steam shovel began to dredge up the earth at his father’s grave. Supervising the disinterment was Professor James Starrs, a criminologist and forensic scientist at George Washington University who had previously unearthed and re-examined the corpses of Jesse James and Dr. Carl Weiss, alleged assassin of Senator Huey Long. After two hours of digging, Starr’s men hauled the rusted casket out of the hole and transported it to a nearby police lab.

In the lab, as he prepared to unseal the lid, Starrs warned Eric not to watch. The sight of his father’s shrunken corpse might prove disturbing. “I’m seeing this!” Eric shot back. When Starrs raised the lid, he was surprised to find Frank Olson’s body remarkably well preserved. The skin was brown and shriveled, but the face was still recognizable. After Eric left the lab, Starrs began his autopsy. He quickly discovered that the New York medical examiner’s report from 1953 was dead wrong. That report had described multiple facial lacerations caused by the impact with the glass. But Starrs was looking at an undamaged face, devoid of cuts. Even more remarkable than what he did not find was what Starrs did find: A large bruise over Olson’s left eye, which suggested to Starrs that the victim had been smashed on the head before plunging through the window. Starr’s concluded that the forensic evidence was “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.”

“I am exceedingly skeptical of the view that Frank Olson went through that window on his own,” Starrs said at the end of his investigation. The evidence suggested that someone had knocked Olson over the head either while he slept or during a struggle, and then tossed him out the window.

Three years later, Eric would discover that a CIA assassination manual written in late 1953 – the period of his father’s death – prescribed exactly that technique. The manual, declassified by the CIA in 1997, contained the following eerie passage: “The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stairwells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. . . . The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [redacted] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge.” The manual recommended a sharp blow to the victim’s temple: “In chase cases it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him.”

Eric had other reasons to believe that his father had been the victim of a CIA assassination. Investigative writer H.P. Albarelli, who had been conducting his own research into the Olson death, claimed to have contact with retired CIA agents in Florida. According to these unnamed sources, the CIA had hired contract killers associated with the Trafficante mob family to murder Frank Olson in Room 1018A. Citing confidentiality agreements with the Agency, these sources have thus far declined to go public with their claims.

Though armed with a mountain of circumstantial evidence, Eric remained hamstrung by the waiver he and his family had signed promising not to sue the CIA. Barred from pursuing the case in civil court, he turned to the criminal justice system. In 1996 Eric asked Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morganthau to open a new investigation. Morganthau agreed, assigning the task to his “cold case” unit. Almost immediately, though, the investigation encountered a major setback. A week after the case was reopened, William Colby, a key witness, vanished. After an intensive ten-day search of the Wicomico River in Southern Maryland, where he had last been seen canoeing by himself, the former CIA chief’s body washed ashore. The death was ruled accidental.

Meanwhile, ex-CIA man Robert Lashbrook fought the New York D.A.’s attempts to interview him; he eventually submitted to a deposition. But the D.A.’s attempts to question Sidney Gottlieb – who was to become a central target of the investigation – hit a terminal snag in 1999 when the ailing Gottlieb died, taking whatever secrets he still guarded to his grave.

Although their cold case proceeded to get colder, the D.A.’s office did manage to dislodge a number of interesting leads. Most notably, a source with connections to Israeli intelligence told the investigators that for years the Mossad had used the case of Frank Olson in its operative training program as an object lesson in the “perfect murder.”

But as new millennium ushered itself in, it was becoming clear to Eric that the New York D.A. was losing interest. Eric inundated cold case unit daily with potential leads, but few were being checked out. Then in early 2002, to Eric’s dismay and frustration, the D.A. quietly dropped the case (the New York D.A.’s office has declined to comment, citing grand jury secrecy). In an angry letter to the New York District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau, Eric and Nils accused the D.A.’s office of being “corrupted [by] and … knuckl[ing] under to federal pressure to back off from any real examination of the facts and motives involved” in the Frank Olson case. In another letter to Assistant D.A. Stephen Saracco, Eric wrote, “I know that you have reason to believe (no – that is too weak a way of putting it; to “know” is more like it) that my father was murdered. You have made that abundantly clear on numerous occasions… Looking back, I realize that it was when you returned from California [to depose Lashbrook] that everything changed. You stopped taking any initiative, you stopped gathering evidence….”

For Eric, the D.A.’s dumping of the Frank Olson case was yet another in a long line of betrayals by the state. But even the worst setbacks can be instructive. He now realized he had been naïve to expect justice from the same government that had committed the crime in question. After all, he observed, “The CIA has never been convicted of any crime in this country.”

Ironically, the Frank Olson case itself may have played a key role in fortifying the CIA’s ability to commit felonies with impunity – the equivalent of a get-out-of-jail-free card. Eric would later uncover an official “memorandum of understanding” between the CIA and the Department of Justice essentially excusing the Agency from having to report crimes committed by its own personnel when doing so might compromise “highly classified and complex covert operations.”

The timing of the memo was interesting. It was drafted in early 1954, shortly after Olson’s death, contemporaneous to the CIA’s internal probe into the Olson affair, and in anticipation of then-pending legislation requiring government agencies to report criminal violations of its employees to the Justice Department.

The memo remained under wraps and officially off the books for decades – until the Frank Olson case erupted again, in 1975. The day after President Ford apologized to the Olsons in the Oval Office, a congressional subcommittee headed by Bella Abzug met to question Lawrence R. Houston, the former CIA general counsel who had drafted the 1954 memo. In the transcript of the hearing, Abzug presses the ex-CIA lawyer to explain the genesis of the memo. When the lawyer hems and haws, Abzug rather astonishingly asks whether the memo might have been used to cover up murder in the Frank Olson case.

ABZUG: It may very well have been a State offense if there was foul play. Was [the Olson case] ever referred to the New York Police Department or State authorities for consideration?
HOUSTON: Not that I recall.

ABZUG: In other words, this memorandum of understanding in your judgment gave authority to the CIA to … give immunity to individuals who happened to work for the CIA for all kinds of crimes, including possibly murder.

Failing to get a straight answer, the indomitable congresswoman presses harder, and Houston finally yields:

HOUSTON: It could have that effect, yes.

ABZUG: Did it have that effect?

HOUSTON: In certain cases it did.

By the time Eric Olson unearthed the hearing transcripts, Abzug had passed away. So it’s not possible to know for sure whether she had any specific reason – other than a well-oiled suspicion of the CIA — to suspect that Frank Olson had been murdered.

Eric would later wonder whether Houston’s “memo of understanding” – or another backroom agreement – had played a role in the abortive investigation by the New York D.A.’s office. As Professor Starrs had once summed up the mystery, “When you pull on the Frank Olson case you feel that something very big is pulling back.”

Embittered, cynical, frustrated — and utterly undeterred — Eric pressed ahead with his own private investigation. Now living by himself in the family home his father built, he surrounded himself with stacks of documents and bits of evidence accumulated in his decades-long pursuit of justice. What little money he managed to scrape together he funneled back into the investigation. Meanwhile, without proper maintenance, the Olson home had fallen into disrepair, its paint peeling and roof sagging. It was, in a sense, a house haunted by its own history.

Although Eric was convinced that his father had been the victim of a CIA assassination, the possible motive behind a murder had long remained the weak link in his theories. But new sources were emerging. One of them was a former CIA pimp named Ira “Ike” Feldman. A squat, muscular fellow who played the tough guy card to the hilt, Feldman had worked as a federal narcotics agent during the 1950s. Most of his historical foot-notoriety, however, stems from his freelance work using prostitutes to lure unsuspecting “johns” to a CIA safehouse in San Francisco, where the unwitting pleasure-seekers would instead be dosed with MK-ULTRA acid. Feldman told Eric that Frank Olson had been murdered.

As Feldman elaborated in a 2002 documentary about Olson aired on German television: “The source that I have was the New York City Police Department, the Bureau of Narcotics agents and the CIA agents themselves. They all say the same thing: that [Olson] was pushed out of the window and did not jump. People who wanted him out of the way said he talked too much and he was telling people about the things he had done, which are American secrets. If you work on a top government secret… and it spills out to people who should not know, there is only one way to do it: kill him.”

To be sure, as a CIA scientist working on some of the nation’s most secret Cold War projects, Frank Olson was in a position to know things that, if exposed publicly, would prove embarrassing to the government. But, Eric wondered, what sort of secrets might his father have known? Another clue arrived when a European investigator and journalist contacted Eric and told him of a trip his father had made to England, Germany and Scandinavia during the summer of 1953. The investigator had interviewed William Sargant, the English psychiatrist and consultant to British intelligence (and author of an early book on brainwashing). Frank Olson had met with Sargant to discuss a moral crisis: he had been horrified to witness “terminal experiments” conducted by the CIA on human subjects – Nazi prisoners and suspected spies who had been plied with the various, sometimes lethal, ARTICHOKE interrogation techniques.

Frank Olson’s special diplomatic passport confirmed that he had indeed traveled on government business to Europe during that time frame. Eric recalled family descriptions of Olson’s state of mind upon returning from the European junket. According to Eric’s uncle, who spoke to Olson during the summer of 1953, he had undergone an ethical crisis of some sort. And at one point, Olson had commented to his wife that Americans were just as responsible for “war crimes” as the Germans had been.

In the spring of 2001, Eric heard from one of his father’s colleagues at Camp Detrick, Norman Cournoyer, a man Eric had assumed was dead. Cournoyer had worked with the elder Olson during World War II to design the protective clothing worn by American soldiers during the invasion of Normandy. He had remained close to Eric’s father after the war, when Olson had been recruited into the CIA. Cournoyer had recently seen an article about Eric in the New York Times Magazine. “Eric,” he said, “you’ve got everything right except for one thing.”

“What’s that?” Eric replied.

“The historical context.”

Eric asked him to elaborate but the old man demurred. “I am eighty-two years old and I’m no longer afraid,” he said. “I’m going to tell you the truth. But I don’t want to do it on the phone.”

A week later, Eric flew to Massachussets to meet Cournoyer in his home. The man who greeted him at the door was physically frail, confined to a wheelchair as the result of a stroke, but still sharp of mind. Cournoyer directed Eric into his dining room, instructing him to remove all the paintings from the wall to make room for the eight-foot-long historical timeline Eric had brought with him, a chronological collage.

Cournoyer got right to the point: “Yes, your father worked for the CIA. He told me that directly.” Cournoyer explained that Frank Olson had revealed sometime in 1946-47 that he was “on a new path” as a CIA employee. That path involved “information retrieval,” an intelligence euphemism for interrogation techniques pioneered under the ARTICHOKE project.

Cournoyer affirmed that Frank Olson had returned from Germany during the summer of 1953 feeling “troubled.” Later, in the documentary aired on German TV, Cournoyer would elaborate, stating that “the people [Olson] saw in Germany [at the CIA interrogation center] went to the extreme. He said: ’Norm, did you ever see a man die?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Well, I did.’”

Olson told Cournoyer that CIA interrogators were using experimental techniques first employed in Nazi drug experiments during wartime. Now the Americans were testing the same techniques on captured Germans and others. “They were using Nazis,” Cournoyer said, “they were using prisoners, they were using Russians.”

But terminal ARTICHOKE experiments weren’t the only matters weighing heavily on Olson’s conscience during the summer of 1953. Pointing to the section on Eric’s timeline spanning the early 1950s, Cournoyer offered a laconic statement: “Korea is the key.” This was the historical context he had referred to in the earlier phone call.

“Your father,” Cournoyer explained, “was horrified to discover that the Americans were using biological warfare in Korea.”
According to Cournoyer, through his work at Camp Detrick, Frank Olson had acquired direct knowledge of illegal biowarfare experiments conducted by U.S. armed forces and the CIA on Korean soldiers and civilians. One of the virulent agents deployed was none other than airborne anthrax, the elder Olson’s area of expertise. Cournoyer’s assertions resonated strongly with Eric. He recalled his mother telling him that Frank Olson had been concerned that the United States was using biological weapons in Korea.

The U.S. government has always denied allegations that it sprayed Korean soldiers with anthrax and dropped a number of other lethal germ warfare agents, including Bubonic plague-bearing fleas. However, the allegations have proved persistent, and, thanks in large part to a 1952 international study into the matter, are generally taken as a given everywhere in the world outside the 202 area code.

Did Frank Olson – hardly reticent about his growing ethical dilemma – become a perceived security risk. Did his superiors fear he might turn whistleblower, exposing dangerous knowledge about America adopting the killing techniques of German and Japanese war criminals? Cournoyer believed so. “This,” he told Eric, “is quite probably what got your father murdered.”

As Eric spoke with his father’s old friend and colleague, Cournoyer’s gardener interrupted them. “There’s something out there,” he said, pointing at the window overlooking the lawn. The men moved to the window. From behind a tree in the middle of the lawn, a huge mountain lion emerged. Padding slowly, it crossed the yard while the men gazed in astonishment. A third-rate novelist couldn’t have ordered up a more obvious literary trope: The cat was indeed out of the bag.

As he continued to assemble his postmortem collage, Eric also encountered signs and symbols of a less fantastical nature.
There was the peculiar memo in Olson’s personnel file at Detrick, which indicated that the CIA did indeed see him as a potential security risk. In 1994, an Associated Press reporter discovered the typewritten memo, which quoted an earlier, hand-written note forwarded to Detrick in 1975 by a person described only as “retired Army and retired DAC” (Army shorthand for “Department of the Army Civilian”). The hand-written note, headlined “Re – Dr. F. W. Olson,” suggested further investigation into Olson’s background in connection to his death. One item on the list suggested that someone look into “Trip to Paris and Norway in 1953(?) and possible fear of security violation. Sources – F.W. Wagner, H.T. Eigelsbach, Robert Lashbrook, and Dr. [Abramson].”

That the CIA had much to hide became dramatically evident during the summer of 2001, when Eric obtained documents from the Gerald Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Among the papers were memos written by senior White House staffers and attorneys who were concerned about the possibility of an Olson family lawsuit – and the inevitable public disclosure it would entail. White House attorney Roderick Hills wrote to White House Deputy Staff Director Dick Cheney (yes, that Dick Cheney) stating, “Dr. Olson’s job [was] so sensitive” that in a trial the government would refuse to reveal it. Another of the memos, written by Cheney on July 11, 1975, the day after the Olson family press conference, and addressed to his boss Donald Rumsfeld (yes, that Donald Rumsfeld) raised concern for:

“…the possibility that it might become necessary to disclose highly classified national security information in connection with any court suit, or legislative hearings.”

Such a revelation was to be avoided at all costs, the internal correspondence stated. What exactly was this “highly classified national security information”? MK-ULTRA? As far as that program was concerned, disclosure was already well underway. . Was the big secret that Olson was a CIA employee? That hardly seems shocking in the context of an accidental LSD dosing. In fact, it might be argued that, PR-wise, a CIA employee dying in a bungled CIA drug experiment is somewhat less scandalous than an innocent Army civilian as fallguy.

Fifty years after the fact, Eric Olson came to believe that he had finally prized loose the carefully guarded state secret of his father’s death. In the summer of 2002, he and his brother Nils were finally ready to lay their father, and the mystery, to rest. Nine years after unearthing Frank Olson’s body, Eric and Nils Olson put their father’s cursed bones back into the ground (the tissue remains in Professor Starr’s lab). They now rest in a plot beside the remains of their sister, Lisa, her husband and child, and their mother, Alice.

The day before the reburial, the surviving Olsons held one last backyard press conference. It wasn’t exactly the sort of closure the Olson family had sought for so many years; after all, no one from the District Attorney’s office was on hand to announce an official finding, or even to call for a congressional inquiry. And no government panel would be publishing a report acknowledging that Frank Olson had been murdered. But nevertheless it was a kind of justice – hard-fought and self-won.

“Frank Olson did not die as a consequence of a drug experiment gone awry,” Eric said, addressing a small huddle of television cameras. “He died because of security concerns regarding disavowed programs of terminal interrogation and the use of biological weapons in Korea. This secret was so immense that even twenty-two years later the White House had been enlisted to maintain it.”

Finally, the fall that had begun 49 years earlier was over. It had held the family suspended in a kind of weightless limbo, captives to the pull of their own unrevealed and unresolved history. And like bodies in motion around a distant, immense, and barely visible object, their destination was forever falling away from under them. But on the day Eric put his father to rest for the second time, the son seemed to have found his footing again. At last, he said, he was ready to move on. “Today,” he announced, “Frank Olson finally hit bottom.” Eric Olson might just as well have been talking about himself.

Click on the image above to purchase the book from Amazon.

Click on the image above to read the chapter on the Olson story from the previous edition, now part of a re-edited Chapter 1 of the new edition.

The Men Who Stare at Goats
(Picador Books, Sept. 2004; Simon and Schuster, April, 2005.)

The 1953 House

There is a house in Frederick, Maryland that has barely been touched since 1953. It looks like an exhibit in a down-at-heel museum of the Cold War. All that brightly coloured Formica, and the kitschy kitchen ornaments — breezy symbols of 1950s American optimism — haven’t stood the test of time.

Eric Olson’s house – and Eric would be the first to admit this – could do with some re-decoration.

Eric was born here, but he never liked Frederick and he never liked this house. He got out as quickly as he could after high school and ended up in Ohio and India and New York and Massachusetts and Stockholm and California, but in 1993 he thought he would just crash out for a few months, and then ten years passed, during which time he hasn’t decorated for three reasons:

He hasn’t any money.

His mind is on other things.

And, really, his life ground to a shuddering halt on November 28th, 1953, and if your living environment is meant to reflect your inner life, Eric’s house does the job. It an inescapable reminder of the moment Eric’s life froze. Eric says that if he ever forgets ‘why I’m doing this’, he just needs to look around his house, and 1953 comes flooding back to him.

Eric says 1953 was probably the most significant year in modern history. He says we’re all stuck in 1953, in a sense, because the events of that year have a continual and overwhelming impact on our lives. He rattled through a list of key events that occurred in 1953. Everest was conquered. James Watson and Francis Crick published, in Nature magazine, their famous paper mapping the double helix structure of DNA. Elvis first visited a recording studio, and Bill Haley’s Rock Around The Clock gave the world rock and roll, and subsequently the teenager. President Truman announced that the United States had developed a hydrogen bomb. The polio vaccine was created, as was the colour TV. And Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, gave a talk to his Princeton alumni group in which he said ‘Mind warfare is the great battlefield of the Cold War, and we have to do whatever it takes to win this.’

On the night of November 28th 1953, Eric went to bed, as normal, a happy 9-year-old child. The family home had been built three years earlier, and his father Frank was still putting the finishing touches to it, but now he was in New York on business. Eric’s mother Alice was sleeping down the hall. His little brother Nils and his sister Lisa were in the next room.

And then, somewhere around dawn, Eric was woken up.

‘It was a very dim November pre-dawn,’ Eric said.

Eric was woken up by his mother and taken down the hall, still wearing his pyjamas, towards the living room – the same room where the two of us now sat, on the same sofas.

Eric turned the corner to see the family doctor sitting there.

‘And,’ Eric said, ‘also, there were these two…’

Eric searched for a moment for the right word to describe the others. He said, ‘There were these two …men… there also.’

The news that the men delivered was that Eric’s father was dead.

‘What are you talking about?’ Eric asked them, crossly.

‘He had an accident,’ said one of the men, ‘and the accident was that he fell or jumped out of a window.’

‘Excuse me?’ said Eric. ‘He did what?’

‘He fell or jumped out of a window in New York.’

‘What does that look like?’ asked Eric.

This question was greeted with silence. Eric looked over at his mother and saw that she was frozen and empty-eyed.

‘How do you fall out of a window?’ said Eric. ‘What does that mean? Why would he do that? What do you mean, fell or jumped?’

‘We don’t know if he fell,’ said one of the men. ‘He might have fallen. He might have jumped.’

‘Did he dive?’ asked Eric.

‘Anyhow,’ said one of the men. ‘It was an accident.’

‘Was he standing on a ledge and he jumped?’ asked Eric.

‘It was a work-related accident,’ said one of the men.

‘Excuse me?’ said Eric. ‘He fell out a window and that’s work related? What?’

Eric turned to his mother.

‘Um,’ he said. ‘What is his work again?’

Eric believed his father was a civilian scientist, working with chemicals at the nearby Fort Detrick military base.

Eric said to me, ‘It very quickly became an incredibly rancorous issue in the family because I was always the kid saying, “Excuse me, where did he go? Tell me this story again.” And my mother very quickly adopted the stance, “Look, I’ve told you this story a thousand times.” And I would say, “Yeah, but I didn’t get it.”

Eric’s mother had created – from the same scant facts offered to Eric – this scenario: Frank Olson was in New York. He was staying in the 10th floor of the Statler Hotel, now the Pennsylvania Hotel, across the road from Madison Square Gardens, in midtown Manhattan. He had a bad dream. He woke up, confused, and headed in the dark towards the bathroom. He became disorientated and fell out of the window.

It was 2 A.M.

Eric and his little brother Nils told their school friends that their father had died of a ‘fatal nervous breakdown’ although they had no idea what this meant. Fort Detrick was what glued the town together. All their friends’ fathers worked at the base. The Olsons would still get invited to neighbourhood picnics and other community events but there didn’t seem any reason for them to be there any more.

When Eric was 16, he and Nils, then 12, decided to cycle from the end of their driveway to San Francisco. Even at that young age, Eric saw the 2,415-mile journey as a metaphor. He wanted to immerse himself in unknown American terrain, the mysterious America that had, for some impenetrable reason, taken his father away from him. He and Nils would ‘reach the goal’ – San Francisco – ‘by small continuous increments of motion along a single strand.’ This was in Eric’s mind a test-run for another goal he would one day reach in an equally fastidious way: the solution to the mystery of what happened to his father in that hotel room in New York at 2am.

I spent a lot of time at Eric’s house, reading his documents and looking though his photos and watching his home movies. There were pictures of the teenage Eric and his younger brother Nils standing by their bikes. Eric had captioned the photograph ‘Happy Bikers.’ There were 8mm videos shot two decades earlier of Eric’s father, Frank, playing in the garden with the children. Then there were some films Frank Olson had shot himself during a trip to Europe a few months before he died. There was Big Ben and the Changing of the Guard. There was the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin. There was the Eiffel Tower. It looked like a family holiday, except the family weren’t with him. Sometimes, in these 8mm films, you catch a glimpse of Frank’s travelling companions, three men, wearing long dark coats and trilby hats, sitting in Parisian pavement cafés, watching the girls go by.

I watched them, and then I watched a home movie that a friend of Eric’s had shot on June 2nd 1994, the day Eric had his father’s body exhumed.

There was the digger breaking through the soil.

There was a local journalist asking Eric, as the coffin was hauled noisily into the back of a truck, ‘Are you having second thoughts about this, Eric?’

She had to yell over the sound of the digger.

‘Ha!’ Eric replied.

‘ I keep expecting you to change your mind,’ shouted the journalist.

Then there was Frank Olson himself, shrivelled and brown on a slab in a pathologist’s lab at Washington Georgetown University, his leg broken, a big hole in his skull.

And then, in this home video, Eric was back at home, exhilarated, talking on the phone to Nils: ‘I saw daddy today!’

After Eric put the phone down he told his friend with the video camera the story of the bicycle trip he and Nils took in 1961, from the bottom of their driveway all the way to San Francisco.

‘I’d seen an article in Boys Life about a 14-year-old kid who cycled from Connecticut to the West Coast,’ Eric said, ‘so I figured my brother was 12 and I was 16 so that averaged at 14, so we could do it. We got these terrible two-speed heavy twin bikes, and we started off right here. 40 West. We heard it went all the way! And we made it! We went all the way!’

‘No!’ said Eric’s friend.

‘Yeah,’ said Eric. ‘We cycled across the country.’

‘No way!’

‘It’s an incredible story,’ said Eric. ‘And we’ve never heard of a younger person than my brother who cycled across the United States. It’s doubtful there is one.

When you think about it, 12, and alone. It took us seven weeks, and we had unbelievable adventures all the way.’

‘Did you camp out?’

‘We camped out. Farmers would invite us to stay in their houses. In Kansas City the police picked us up, figuring we were runaways, and when they found out we weren’t they let us stay in their jail.’

‘And your mom let you do this?’

‘Yeah, that’s a kind of unbelievable mystery.’

(Eric’s mother Alice had died by 1994. She had been drinking on the quiet since the 1960s, and had begun locking herself in the bathroom and coming out mean and confused. Eric would never have exhumed his father’s remains while she was alive. His sister Lisa had died too, together with her husband and their 2-year-old son. They’d been flying to the Adirondacks, where they were going to invest money in a lumber mill. The plane crashed, and everyone on board was killed.)

‘Yeah,’ said Eric, ‘it’s an unbelievable mystery that my mother let us go, but we called home twice a week from different places, and the local paper, the Frederick paper, twice a week had these front-page articles: Olsons Reach St Louis! All across the country back then there were billboards advertising a place called Harolds Club, which was a big gambling casino in Reno. It used to be the biggest casino in the world. And their motif was HAROLDS CLUB OR BUST! Every day we’d see these billboards, HAROLDS CLUB OR BUST! It became a kind of slogan for our journey. When we got to Reno we realised we couldn’t get into Harolds Club because we were too young. So we decided to make a sign that said HAROLDS CLUB OR BUST! tie it to the back of our bikes, go over to Harolds Club and tell Harold, whoever he might be, that we’d had this across the whole United States and we were just crazy to see Harold’s Club.

So we went into a drugstore. We brought an old cardboard box and some crayons, and we started writing this sign. The woman who sold us the crayons said, “What are you guys doing?”

We said, “We’re going to make a sign, HAROLDS CLUB OR BUST! and tell Harold that we cycled all the way from…”

She said, “These people are very smart. They’re not going to fall for this.”

So we made this thing, took it out onto the streets, scuffed it up, tied it to the back of our bikes, went over to Harolds Club, got to this big entry-way – Harolds Club was this gigantic thing, literally the biggest gambling casino in the world – and there was a doorperson there.

He said, “What do you boys want?”

We said, “We want to meet Harold.”

He said, “Harold is not here.”

We said, “Well, who is here?”

He said, “Harold senior is not here but Harold junior is here.”

We said, “That’s fine, we’ll take Harold junior.”

He said, “Okay, I’ll go in and see.”

Pretty soon out strides this dude in a fancy cowboy suit. Handsome guy. So he comes out and looks at our bikes and he says, “What are you guys doing?”

We said, “Harold. We’ve been cycling across the United States and we’ve wanted to see Harolds Club the whole time. We’ve been sweating across the desert.”

And he said, “Well, come on in!”

We ended up staying for a week at Harolds Club. He took us up in a helicopter around Reno, put us up in a fancy hotel. And when we were leaving he said, “I guess you guys want to see Disneyland, right? Well let me call up my friend Walt!”

So he called up Walt Disney, and this is one of the great disappointments of my life, Walt wasn’t home.’

*

I have wondered why Eric spent the evening of the day he had his father’s body exhumed telling his friend the story of Harolds Club Or Bust. Maybe it’s because Eric had spent so much of his adult life failing to be offered the kindness of strangers, failing to benefit from anything approaching an American dream, but now Frank Olson was out there, lying on a slab in a pathologist’s lab, and perhaps things were about to turn around for Eric. Maybe some mysterious Harold junior would come along and kindly explain everything.

Happy Bikers.

*

In 1970, Eric enrolled at Harvard. He went home every Thanksgiving weekend, and because Frank Olson went out of the window during the Thanksgiving holiday of 1953, the family invariably ended up watching old home movies of Frank, and Eric inevitably said to his mother, ‘Tell me the story again.’

During Thanksgiving weekend 1974, Eric’s mother replied, ‘I’ve told you this story a hundred times, a thousand times.’

Eric said, ‘Just tell me it one more time.’

And so Eric’s mother sighed and she began.

Frank Olson had spent a weekend on an office retreat in a cabin called the Deep Creek Lodge in rural Maryland. When he came home, his mood was unusually anxious.

He told his wife, ‘I made a terrible mistake and I’ll tell you what it was when the children have gone to bed.’

But the conversation never got around to what the terrible mistake had been.

Frank remained agitated all weekend. He told Alice he wanted to quit his job and become a dentist. On the Sunday night Alice tried to calm him down by taking him to the cinema in Frederick to see whatever was on, which turned out to be a new film called Martin Luther.

It was the story of Luther’s crisis of conscience over the corruption of the Catholic Church in the 16th Century, when its theologians claimed it was impossible for the Church to do any wrong, because they defined the moral code. They were fighting the Devil, after all. The film climaxed with Luther declaring, ‘No. Here I stand, I can do no other.’ The moral of Martin Luther is that the individual cannot hide behind the institution.

(TV Guide’s movie review database gives Martin Luther 2/5 stars and says, ‘It is not “entertainment” in the usual sense of the word. One wishes there might have been some humour in the script, to make the man look more human. The film was made with such respect that the subject matter seems gloomy when it should be uplifting.’)

The trip to the cinema didn’t help Frank’s mood, and the next day it was suggested by some colleagues that he go to New York to visit a psychiatrist. Alice drove Frank to Washington DC and she dropped him off at the offices of the men who would accompany him to New York.

This was the last time she ever saw her husband.

On the spur of the moment, during that Thanksgiving weekend in 1974, Eric asked his mother a question he’d never thought to ask before:

‘Describe the offices where you dropped him off.’

So she did.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Eric, ‘that sounds just like CIA headquarters.’

And then Eric’s mother became hysterical.

She screamed, ‘You will never find out what happened in that hotel room!’

Eric said, ‘As soon as I finish at Harvard I’m going to move back home and I’m not going to rest until I find out the truth.’

*

Eric didn’t have to wait long for a breakthrough. He received a telephone call from a family friend on the morning of June 11th 1975: ‘Have you seen the Washington Post? I think you’d better take a look.’

It was a front-page story, and the headline read:

SUICIDE REVEALED

‘A civilian employee of the Department of the Army unwittingly took LSD as part of a Central Intelligence Agency test, then jumped 10 floors to his death less than a week later, according to the Rockefeller commission report released yesterday.’

(The Rockefeller Commission had been created to investigate CIA misdeeds in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal.)

‘The man was given the drug while attending a meeting with CIA personnel working on a test project that involved the administration of mind-bending drugs to unsuspecting Americans.

“This individual was not made aware he had been given LSD until about 20 minutes after it had been administered,” the commission said. “He developed serious side effects and was sent to New York with a CIA escort for psychiatric treatment. Several days later, he jumped from a tenth-floor window of his room and died as a result.”

The practice of giving drugs to unsuspecting people lasted from 1953 to 1963, when it was discovered by the CIA’s inspector general and stopped, the commission said.’

‘Is this my father?’ thought Eric.

The headline was misleading. Not much was ‘revealed’ – not even the name of the victim.

‘Is this what happened at the Deep Creek Lodge?’ thought Eric. ‘They slipped him LSD? No, but it has to be my father. How many army scientists were jumping out of hotel windows in New York in 1953?’

On the whole, the American public reacted to the Frank Olson story in much the same way that they responded, 50 years later, to the news that Barney was being used to torture Iraqi detainees. Horror would be the wrong word. People were basically amused and fascinated. As in the case of Barney, this response was, I think, triggered by the disconcertingly surreal combination of dark intelligence secrets and familiar pop culture.

‘For America it was lurid,’ said Eric, ‘and exciting.’

The Olsons were invited to the White House so President Ford could personally apologise to them – ‘He was very, very sorry,’ said Eric – and the photographs from that day show the family beaming and entranced inside the Oval Office.

‘When you look at those photographs now,’ I asked Eric one day, ‘what do they say to you?’

‘They say that the power of that Oval Office for seduction is enormous,’ Eric replied, ‘as we now know from Clinton. You go into that sacred space – that oval – and you’re really in a special charmed circle and you can’t think straight. It works. It really works.’

Outside the White House, after their 17-minute meeting with President Ford, Alice Olson gave a statement to the press.

‘I think it should be noted,’ she said, ‘that an American family can receive communication from the President of the United States. I think that’s a tremendous tribute to our country.’

‘She felt very embraced by Gerald Ford,’ said Eric. ‘They laughed together, and so on.’

The Olsons in the Oval Office. Eric is second from the right.

The Olsons back at home.

The President promised the Olsons full disclosure, and the CIA provided the family, and America, with a flurry of details, each more unexpected than the last.

The CIA had slipped LSD into Frank Olson’s Cointreau at a camping retreat called the Deep Creek Lodge. The project was code-named MK-ULTRA, and they did it, they explained, because they wanted to watch how a scientist would cope with the effects of a mind-altering drug. Would he be unable to resist revealing secrets? Would the information be coherent? Could LSD be used as a truth serum for CIA interrogators?

And there was another motive. The CIA later admitted that they very much enjoyed paranoid thrillers like The Manchurian Candidate and they wanted to know if they could create real life brainwashed assassins by pumping people with LSD. But Frank Olson had a bad trip, perhaps giving rise to the legend that if you take LSD you believe you can fly and you end up falling out of windows.

Social historians and political satirists immediately labelled these events ‘a great historical irony’, and Eric repeated these words to me through gritted teeth because he doesn’t appreciate the fact that his father’s death has become a fragment of an irony.

‘The great historical irony,’ Eric said, ‘being that “the CIA brought LSD to America thereby bringing a kind of enlightenment, thereby opening up a new level of political consciousness, thereby sowing the seeds of its own undoing because it created an enlightened public.” It made great copy, and you’ll find that this theme is the motif of a lot of books.’

The details kept coming, so thick and fast that Frank Olson was in danger of becoming lost, swept away like a twig in the tidal wave of this colourful story. Also in 1953, the CIA told the Olsons, they created an MK-ULTRA brothel in New York City, where they spiked the customers’ drinks with LSD. They placed an agent called George White behind a one-way mirror where he moulded, and passed up the chain of command, little models made out of pipe cleaners. The models represented the sexual positions considered, by the observant George White, to be the most effective in releasing a flow of information.

When George White left the CIA his letter of resignation read, in part, ‘I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun … Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?’

George White addressed this letter to his boss, the very same CIA man who had spiked Frank Olson’s Cointreau: an ecology-obsessed Buddhist named Sidney Gottlieb.

Gottlieb had learnt the art of sleight-of-hand from a Broadway magician called John Mulholland. This magician is all but forgotten today but back then he was a big star, a David Copperfield, who mysteriously bowed out of the public eye in 1953, claiming ill health, when the truth was that he had been secretly employed by Sidney Gottlieb to teach agents how to spike people’s drinks with LSD.

Mulholland also taught Gottlieb how to slip bio-toxins into the toothbrushes and cigars of America’s enemies abroad. It was Gottlieb who travelled to Congo to assassinate the country’s first democratically elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba by putting toxins in his toothbrush (he failed: the story goes that someone else, a non-American, managed to assassinate Lumumba first).

It was Gottlieb who mailed a monogrammed handkerchief, doctored with brucellosis, to Iraqi colonel Abd a-Karim Qasim. Qasim survived.

And it was Gottlieb who travelled to Cuba to slip poisons into Fidel Castro’s cigars and his diving suit. Castro survived.

It was like a comedy routine, like the Marx Brothers Become Covert Assassins, and sometimes it seemed to Eric as if his family were the only people not laughing.

‘The image that was presented to us,’ Eric said, ‘was fraternity boys out of control. “We tried some crazy things, and we made errors of judgement. We put various poisons in Castro’s cigars but none of that worked. And then we decided that we weren’t really good at that sort of thing.”’

‘A clown assassin,’ I said.

‘A clown assassin,’ said Eric. ‘Ineptitude. We drug people and they jump out of windows. We try to assassinate people and we get there too late. And we never actually assassinated anybody.’

Eric paused.

‘And Gottlieb turns up everywhere!’ he said. ‘Is Gottlieb the only person in the shop? Does he have to do everything?’ Eric laughed. ‘And this is what my mother was seizing on when she talked to Gottlieb. She said, “How could you do such a harebrained scientific experiment? Where’s the medical supervision? Where’s the control group? You call this science?’ And Gottlieb basically replied, ‘Yeah, it was a bit casual. We’re sorry for that.”’

As I sat in Eric Olson’s house and listened to his story I remembered that I had heard Sidney Gottlieb’s name mentioned before, in some other faraway context. Then it came to me. Before General Stubblebine came along, the secret psychic spies had another administrator: Sidney Gottlieb.

It took me a while to remember this because it seemed so unlikely. What was someone like Sidney Gottlieb, a poisoner, an assassin (albeit a not particularly good one), the man indirectly responsible for the death of Frank Olson, doing in the middle of this other, funny, psychic story? It seemed remarkable to me that the organizational gap in the intelligence world between the light side (psychic supermen) and the dark side (covert assassinations) has been so narrow. But it wasn’t until Eric showed me a letter his mother received out of the blue on July 13th 1975 that I began to understand just how narrow it was. The letter was from The Diplomat Motor Hotel, in Ocean City, Maryland. It read:

Dear Mrs Olson,

After reading the newspaper accounts on the tragic death of your husband, I felt compelled to write to you.
At the time of your husband’s death, I was the assistant night manager at the Hotel Statler in New York and was at his side almost immediately after his fall. He attempted to speak but his words were unintelligible. A priest was summoned and he was given the last rites.

Having been in the hotel business for the last 36 years and witnessed innumerable unfortunate incidents, your husband’s death disturbed me greatly due to the most unusual circumstances of which you are now aware.

If I can be of any assistance to you, please do not hesitate to call upon me.

My heartfelt sympathy to you and your family.

Sincerely
Armond D. Pastore
General Manager.

The Olsons did phone Armond Pastore to thank him for his letter, and it was then that Pastore told them what happened in the moments after Frank had died in his arms on the street at 2am.

Pastore said he went back inside the hotel and he spoke to the telephone switchboard operator. He asked her if any calls had been made from Frank Olson’s room.

She said that there was just one call, and she had listened in to it. It was very short. It was made immediately after Frank Olson went out of the window.

The man in Frank Olson’s room said, ‘Well, he’s gone.’

The voice on the other end of the phone said, ‘That’s too bad.’

And then they both hung up.

Harolds Club Or Bust!

Eric Olson has a swimming pool in his back garden – one of the very few additions to the house made since 1953. On a hot day in August, Eric and his brother Nils and Eric’s son, who usually lives in Sweden, and Nils’s wife and their children, and some of Eric’s friends and I, were sunbathing by the pool, when a truck covered with pictures of party balloons – Capital Party Rentals – pulled up in his driveway to drop off 100 plastic seats.

‘Hey! Coloured chairs!’ yelled Eric.

‘You want the coloured chairs?’ said the driver.

‘Nah,’ said Eric. ‘Inappropriate.’

Eric had brought a ghetto blaster down to the poolside and he tuned it to National Public Radio’s All Things Considered because the legendary reporter Daniel Schorr was about to deliver a commentary about him. Daniel Schorr was the first man to interview Khrushchev, he won three Emmys for his coverage of Watergate, and now he was turning his attention to Eric.

His commentary began.

‘…Eric Olson is ready to charge in a news conference tomorrow that the story of a suicide plunge makes no sense…’

Eric leaned up against the wire fence that surrounded his swimming pool and he grinned at his friends and his family, who were listening intently to this broadcast.

‘…and that his father was killed to silence him about the lethal activities he’d been involved in, projects codenamed Artichoke and MK-ULTRA. Today a spokesman for the CIA said no congressional or executive branch probes of the Olson case have turned up any evidence of homicide. Eric Olson may not have the whole story. The thing is, the government’s lid on its secrets remains so tight, we may never know the whole story…’

Eric flinched.

‘Don’t go there, Dan,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Don’t go there.’

‘…This is Daniel Schorr…’

‘Don’t GO there, Dan,’ Eric said.

He turned to us all, sitting by the pool. We sat there and said nothing.

‘See?’ said Eric. ‘That’s what they want to do. ‘“We may never know the whole story.” And there’s so much comfort they take in that. Bullshit. Bullshit. “Oh, it could be this, it could be that, and everything in the CIA is a hall of mirrors, layers, you can never get to the bottom…” When people say that, what they’re really saying is, “We’re comfortable with this because we don’t want to know.” It’s like my mother always said, “You’re never going to know what happened in that hotel room.” Well, something DID happen in that room and it is knowable.’

Suddenly, Eric is 60 years old. Decades have gone by, and he has spent them investigating his father’s death. One day I asked him if he regretted this, and he replied, ‘I regret it all the time.’

Piecing together the facts has been hard enough for Eric, the facts being buried in classified documents, or declassified documents covered with thick black lines made with marker pens, or worse – Sidney Gottlieb admitted to Eric during one meeting that he had, on his retirement, destroyed the MK-ULTRA files. When Eric asked him why, Gottlieb explained that his ‘ecological sensitivity’ had made him aware of the dangers of ‘paper overflow’.

Gottlieb added that it didn’t really matter that the documents were ruined, because it was all a waste anyway. All the MK-ULTRA experiments were futile, he told Eric. They had all come to nothing. Eric left Gottlieb realising he’d been truly beaten by a first class mind.

‘What a brilliant cover story,’ he thought. ‘In a success-obsessed society like this one, what’s the best rock to hide something under? It’s the rock called failure.’

So most of the facts were retained only in the memories of men who did not want to talk. Nonetheless, Eric has constructed a narrative that is just as plausible, even more plausible, than the LSD suicide story.

Collecting the facts has been difficult enough, but there has been something even harder.

‘The old story is so much fun,’ Eric said, ‘why would anyone want to replace it with a story that’s not fun. You see? The person who puts the spin on the story controls it from the beginning. Its very hard for people to read against the grain of what you’ve been told the narrative is about.’

‘Your new story is not as much fun,’ I agreed.

‘This is no longer a happy, feelgood story,’ Eric said, ‘and I don’t like it better than anyone else does. It’s hard to accept that your father didn’t die because of suicide, nor did he die because of negligence after a drug experiment, he died because they killed him. That’s a different feeling.’

And, vexingly for Eric, on the rare occasions he’s convinced a journalist that the CIA murdered his father, the revelation has not been greeted with horror. One writer declined Eric’s invitation to attend tomorrow’s press conference by saying ‘We know the CIA kills people. That’s old news.’

In fact, Eric told me, tomorrow would be the first time anyone had ever publicly charged the CIA with murdering an American citizen.

‘People have been so brainwashed by fiction,’ said Eric as we drove to the local Kinko’s to pick up the press releases for the conference, ‘so brainwashed by the Tom Clancy thing, they think, “We know this stuff. We know the CIA does this.” Actually, we know nothing of this. There’s no case of this, and all this fictional stuff is like an immunisation against reality. It makes people think they know things that they don’t know and it enables them to have a kind of superficial quasi-sophistication and cynicism which is just a thin layer beyond which they’re not cynical at all.’

It isn’t that people aren’t interested: it’s that they’re interested in the wrong way. Recently a theatre director approached Eric for his permission to turn the Frank Olson story into ‘an opera about defenestration’, but Eric declined, explaining that this was a complex enough tale anyway even without having the facts sung at an audience. Tomorrow’s press conference was really Eric’s last chance to convince the world that his father was not an LSD suicide.

*

There were so many ways for Eric to recount his new version of the story at the press conference. It was impossible for him – for anyone – to know how to do it in the most coherent and still entertaining way. Eric’s new story is not only no longer fun, it is also exasperatingly intricate. There’s so much information to absorb that an audience could just glaze over.

Really, this story begins with the proclamation delivered by the CIA director Allen Dulles to his Princeton alumni group in 1953.

‘Mind warfare,’ he said, ‘is the great battlefield of the Cold War and we have to do whatever it takes to win this.’

Before Jim Channon and General Stubblebine and Colonel Alexander came along, there was Allen Dulles, the first great out-of-the-box thinker in US intelligence. He was a great friend of the Bushes, once the Bush family lawyer, a pipe-smoking patriarch who believed that the CIA should be like an ivy league university, taking inspiration not only from agents, but also from scientists, academics, and whoever else might come up with something new. It was Dulles who moved the CIA’s headquarters from central Washington DC to suburban Langley, Virginia (now renamed The George Bush Center For Intelligence) because he wanted to create a thoughtful, out-of-town campus milieu. It was Dulles who sent undercover CIA agents out into the American suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s to infiltrate séances in the hope of unearthing and recruiting America’s most talented clairvoyants to his mind-warfare battlefield, which is how the relationship between intelligence and the psychic world was born. But it was General Stubblebine who, inspired by the First Earth Battalion, proclaimed a generation later that anyone could be a great psychic, and so he opened the doors wide, and Major Ed Dames joined the program, and subsequently revealed the secrets of the unit on the Art Bell show, and then all hell broke loose and 39 people in San Diego killed themselves in an attempt to hitch a ride on Prudence and Courtney’s Hale Bopp companion.

Allen Dulles put Sidney Gottlieb in charge of the fledgling psychic program, and also MK-ULTRA, and then a third covert mind-warfare project known as Artichoke.

Artichoke is the program that is not fun.

Recently declassified documents reveal that Artichoke was all about inventing insane, brutal, violent, frequently fatal new ways of interrogating people.

Frank Olson was not just a civilian scientist working with chemicals at Fort Detrick. He was a CIA man too. He was working for Artichoke. This is why he was in Europe in the months before he died, sitting in pavement cafes with the other men wearing long coats and trilbies. They were there on Artichoke business. Eric’s father was – and there is no pleasant way of putting this – a pioneering torturer, or at the very least a pioneering torturer’s assistant. Artichoke was the First Earth Battalion of torture – a like-minded group of ground-breaking out-of-the-box thinkers, coming up with all manner of clever new ways of getting information out of people.

An example: according to a CIA document dated April 26th 1952, the Artichoke men ‘used heroin on a routine basis’, because they determined that heroin (and other substances) ‘can be useful in reverse because of the stresses produced when they are withdrawn from those who are addicted to their use.’

This is why, Eric has learnt, his father was recruited to Artichoke. He, alone among the interrogators, had a scientific knowledge of how to administer drugs and chemicals.

And now, in 2004, this Artichoke-created cold turkey method of interrogation is back in business. Mark Bowden, the author of Black Hawk Down, interviewed a number of CIA interrogators for the October 2003 edition of Atlantic Monthly, and this is the scenario he constructed:

‘On what may or may not have been March 1 [2003] the notorious terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was roughly awakened by a raiding party of Pakistani and American commandos …Here was the biggest catch yet in the war on terror. Sheikh Mohammed is considered the architect of two attempts on the World Trade Center: the one that failed, in 1993, and the one that succeeded so catastrophically, eight years later …He was flown to an “undisclosed location” (a place the CIA calls “Hotel California”) — presumably a facility in another cooperative nation, or perhaps a specially designed prison aboard an aircraft carrier.

It doesn’t much matter where, because the place would not have been familiar or identifiable to him. Place and time, the anchors of sanity, were about to come unmoored. He might as well have been entering a new dimension, a strange new world where his every word, move, and sensation would be monitored and measured; where things might be as they seemed but might not; where there would be no such thing as day or night, or normal patterns of eating and drinking, wakefulness and sleep; where hot and cold, wet and dry, clean and dirty, truth and lies, would all be tangled and distorted.

The space would be filled night and day with harsh light and noise. Questioning would be intense—sometimes loud and rough, sometimes quiet and friendly, with no apparent reason for either. The session might last for days, with interrogators taking turns, or it might last only a few minutes. On occasion he might be given a drug to elevate his mood prior to interrogation; marijuana, heroin, and sodium pentothal have been shown to overcome a reluctance to speak. These drugs could be administered surreptitiously with food or drink, and given the bleakness of his existence, they might even offer a brief period of relief and pleasure, thereby creating a whole new category of longing—and new leverage for his interrogators.’

See how in this scenario a slice of Jim Channon’s First Earth Battalion (‘harsh light and noise’) and a slice of Frank Olson’s Artichoke (‘a whole new category of longing’) come together like two pieces of a jigsaw.

On the day before Eric’s press conference, Eric and I watched old 8mm home movies of his father playing in the garden with his children. On the screen, Frank was riding a wobbly old bicycle and Eric, then a toddler, was resting on the handlebars. Eric gazed, smiling, at the screen.

He said, ‘There’s my father. Right there! That’s him! In comparison with the other guys from the CIA, he has an open face. Um…’

Eric paused. ‘Basically,’ he said, ‘this is a story about a guy who had a simple moral code and a naïve view of the world. He wasn’t fundamentally a military guy. And he certainly wasn’t someone who would be involved in “terminal interrogations”. He went though a moral crisis, but he was in too deep and they couldn’t let him out.’

We continued watching the home video. Then Eric said, ‘Think of how much could have been different if he was alive to tell any of this. Ha! The whole history of a lot of things would be different. And you can see a lot of that just in his face. A lot of the other men have very tight, closed faces. He doesn’t…’

And then Eric trailed off.

At some point during his investigation, Eric hooked up with the British journalist Gordon Thomas, who has written numerous books on intelligence matters. Through Thomas, Eric learned that during a trip to London in the summer of 1953 his father had apparently confided in William Sargant, a consultant psychiatrist who advised British intelligence on brainwashing techniques.

According to Thomas, Frank Olson told Sargant that he had visited secret joint American-British research installations near Frankfurt, where the CIA was testing truth serums on “expendables,” captured Russian agents and ex-Nazis. Olson confessed to Sargant that he had witnessed something terrible, possibly “a terminal experiment” on one or more of the expendables. Sargant heard Olson out and then he reported to British intelligence that the young American scientist’s misgivings were making him a security risk. He recommended that Olson be denied further access to Porton Down, the British chemical-weapons research establishment.

After Eric learnt this, he told his friend, the writer Michael Ignatieff, who published an article about Eric in the New York Times. A week later, Eric received the telephone call he’d been waiting for his whole life. It was a real Harold Junior, one of his father’s best friends from Detrick, a man who knew everything, and was willing to tell Eric the whole story.

His name was Norman Cournoyer.

Eric spent a weekend at Norman’s house in Connecticut. Revealing to Eric the secrets he’d been harbouring all these years was so stressful for Norman that he repeatedly excused himself so he could go to the toilet and vomit.

Norman told Eric that the Artichoke story was true. Frank told Norman that ‘they didn’t mind if people came out of this or not. They might survive, they might not. They might be put to death.’

Eric said, ‘Norman declined to go into detail about what this meant but he said it wasn’t nice. Extreme torture, extreme use of drugs, extreme stress.’

Norman told Eric that his father was in deep, and horrified at the way his life had turned. He watched people die in Europe, perhaps he even helped them die, and by the time he returned to America he was determined to reveal what he had seen. There was a 24-hour contingent of Quakers down at the Fort Detrick gates, peace protestors, and Frank would wander over to chat to them, much to the dismay of his colleagues. Frank asked Norman one day, ‘Do you know a good journalist I can talk to?’

And so, Eric said, slipping LSD into his father’s Cointreau at the Deep Creek Lodge was not an experiment that went wrong: it was designed to get him to talk while hallucinating. And Frank failed the test. He revealed his intentions to Gottlieb and the other MK-ULTRA men present. This was the ‘terrible mistake’ he had made. Seeing Martin Luther on the Sunday night had made him all the more determined to quit his job. Here I stand. I can do no other.

And on the Monday morning Frank did, indeed, tender his resignation, but his colleagues persuaded him to seek psychological counselling in New York.

Documents reveal that Frank never saw a psychiatrist in New York. He was taken instead, by Gottlieb’s deputy, to the office of the former Broadway magician John Mulholland, who probably hypnotised him, and Frank probably failed that test too.

Housing a possibly deranged and desperate man in a hotel room high above Seventh Avenue no longer seemed like a regrettable error of judgment. It seemed like the prelude to murder.

When Eric had his father’s body exhumed in 1994, the pathologist, Dr James Starrs, found a hole in Frank’s head that – he concluded – came from the butt of a gun and not a fall from a 10th floor window.

‘Well, he’s gone,’ said the voice of Sidney Gottlieb’s deputy, Robert Lashbrook.

‘That’s too bad,’ came the reply.
And they both hung up.

*

There were around 40 journalists at Eric’s press conference – crews from all the networks and many of the big newspapers. Eric had decided – for the purposes of clarity – to tell the story primarily through the narrative of his weekend with Norman Cournoyer. He repeatedly stressed that this was no longer a family story. This was now a story about what happened to America in the 1950s and how that informs what is happening today.

‘Where’s the proof?’ asked Julia Robb, the reporter from Eric’s local paper, the Frederick News Post, when he had finished. ‘Does all this rest on the word of one man, your father’s friend?’

Julia looked around her to make the point that this Norman Cournoyer wasn’t even in attendance.

‘No,’ said Eric. He looked exasperated. ‘As I’ve tried to tell you it conceptually rests on the idea that there are two vectors in this story and they only intersect in one place.’

There was a baffled silence.

‘Are you in any way motivated by ideology over this?’ the man from Fox News asked.

‘Just a desire to know the truth,’ sighed Eric.

Later, as the journalists milled around, eating from the buffet that was laid out on the picnic tables, the conversation among the Olsons and their friends turned to Julia Robb, the reporter from the Frederick News Post. Someone said he thought it was a shame that the most hostile journalist present represented Eric and Nils’s local paper.

‘Yeah it is,’ said Nils. ‘It’s painful to me. I’m a professional here in town. I have connections with local people as a dentist, and I see people on a daily basis who come in and read the local paper, and that affects me.’

Nils looked over at Eric, who was saying something to Julia, across the garden, but we couldn’t hear what.
Nils said, ‘At times you go through a phase of believing that maybe the story is a bunch of hooey, and that it was just a simple LSD suicide and that…’

Nils glanced at Julia.

‘…can trigger a kind of shame spiral. Its like the feelings you’ve had in the middle of the night, at 3am, when you’re trying to get to sleep and you start having some thought and the thought spins you into another negative thought and it kind of spins out of control and you have to shake yourself and maybe turn the light on and get grounded in reality again.’

Eric and Julia were arguing now. Julia said something to Eric and then she walked away, back to her car. (Later Eric said to me that Julia seemed ‘incensed, as if the entire story made her furious in some deep way that she was completely at a loss to articulate.’)

‘I mean,’ said Nils, ‘America fundamentally wants to think of itself as being good, and we’re fundamentally right in what we’re doing, and we have a very compelling responsibility for the free world. And looking at some of these issues is troubling, because if America does have a darker side it threatens your hold on your view of America and it’s kind of like, “Gee, if I pull out this one underpinning of the American consciousness, is this a house of cards? Does it really threaten the fundamental nature of America?”’

We drifted back down to the swimming pool, and an hour passed, and then Eric joined us. He’d been in the house on the telephone. He was laughing.

‘You hear the latest?’ he said.

‘Bring me up to date,’ said Nils. ‘I’m dying to hear.’

‘Julia,’ said Eric, ‘called Norman. I just called her and she said, “Eric, I’m glad you phoned. I just called Norman. He says he has no reason to believe that the CIA would murder Frank Olson.” I said, “Julia thanks for respecting my wishes about not calling Norman.” She said, “Eric, I’m a reporter. I have to do what’s necessary to get the story.”’

Eric laughed, although nobody else did.

*

And so I drove to Connecticut, to Norman Cournoyer’s house. I was slightly shaken by the news of the telephone call between Julia Robb and Norman. Had I got Eric wrong? Was he some kind of fantasist?

Norman lives in a large white bungalow in an upmarket suburban street. His wife answered the door and she led me into the living room where Norman was waiting for me. He pointed to the table and said, ‘I dug out some old photographs for you.’

They were of Norman and Frank Olson, arm in arm, somewhere in the middle of Fort Detrick, circa 1953.
‘Did you tell the reporter from the Fredrick News Post that you had no evidence to suggest that Frank was murdered by the CIA?’ I asked.

‘Yeah,’ said Norman.

‘Why did you do that?’ I asked.

‘Over the phone?’ said Norman. ‘I think a journalist is making a big mistake in trying to get somebody to talk over the phone.’

‘So you do think Frank was murdered?’ I said.

‘I’m sure of it,’ said Norman.

And then he told me something he hadn’t told Eric.

‘I saw Frank after he’d been given the LSD,’ he said. ‘We joked about it.’

‘Nah,’ said Norman. ‘He was laughing about it. He said, “They’re getting very, very uptight now because of what they believe I am capable of.” He really thought they were picking on him because he was the man who might give away the secrets.’

‘Was he going to talk to a journalist?’ I asked.

‘He came so close it wasn’t even funny,’ said Norman.

‘Did he come back from Europe looking very upset?’ I asked.

‘Yeah,’ said Norman. ‘We talked about a week, ten days, after he came back. I said “What happened to you Frank? You seem awfully upset.” He said, “Oh, you know…” I must admit, in all honesty, it’s just coming back to me now. He said…’

Suddenly, Norman fell silent.

‘I don’t want to go on further than that,’ he said. ‘There are certain things that I don’t want to talk about.’

Norman looked out of the window.

‘It speaks for itself,’ he said.

*

Eric hoped his press conference would, at least, change the language of the reporting of the story. At best it would motivate some energetic journalist to take the challenge and find an unequivocal smoking gun that proved Frank Olson was pushed out of the window.

But in the days that followed the press conference it became clear that every journalist had decided to report the story in much the same way.

Eric had finally found ‘closure.’

He was on the way to being ‘healed’.

He had ‘laid his mystery to rest.’

He could ‘move on’ now.

Perhaps we will ‘never know’ what really happened to Frank Olson, but the important thing was that Eric had achieved ‘closure’.

The story was fun again.

CLOSE

From Norman Mailer’s novel, Harlot’s Ghost

All the same, not many occasions in my life had been more momentous than the summer day in 1982 when Harlot had invited me to work again with him. “Yes,” he had said, “I need your assistance so much that I will forgo my true innings.” His knuckles, huge as carbuncles, fretted his wheel chair forward and back.…

It was exactly at this time, when disaffection was collecting in my pores like bile, that Harlot summoned me to his rump office at the farmhouse in Virginia, much as he must have called in several other men like myself, still ambitious enough to know rage that their careers were in irons, yet old enough to suffer the knowledge that their best years were committed and gone. Who knows what Harlot cooked up for the others? I can tell you what he talked about with me.

We, at the CIA, had gone through some considerable suffering on the exposure of the Family Jewels in 1975. Maybe a few bushmen in Australia had not heard how we labored to rub Fidel Castro out, but by the time the Senate Select Committee to Study Intelligence Activities had done inquiring, there were very few bushmen. The rest of the world had learned that we were ready to kill Patrice Lumumba as well, and had gone in for LSD experiments in brainwashing so exuberantly that one of our subjects, a Dr. Frank Olson (on government contract), had jumped out the window. We hid the fact from his widow. She spent twenty years thinking her husband was an ordinary suicide, which is onerous for a family to believe since there are no ordinary suicides. We opened mail between Russia and the U.S. and closed it again and sent it on. We spied on high government officials like Barry Goldwater and Bobby Kennedy; we had all of those activities advertised in the marketplace. Since we are, at CIA, a proud and secretive people, we felt not unlike a convention of Methodist ministers who are sued by a fine hotel for infesting the bed linen with crab lice. The Company had never been quite the same since exposure of the Family Jewels.

In its wake many of our top men had to go.…

Seven years later [Harlot] was calling me to action. “I ask us, Harry boy,” he said, “to forgive the spears we’ve left in one another. There is a scandal forming that will prove worse than the “Skeletons”—which was his term for the Family Jewels. “I’d estimate about as much worse as Hiroshima was an order of magnitude beyond Pearl Harbor. The Skeletons decimated our ranks; the High Holies, if not excised, will cut us right out of the map.

(PP. 26-28 Ballentine paperback edition)

[Herrick]

“How are your headaches?” asked my father at the bar at Twenty-One.…

“Herrick, I haven’t seen a superior hell of a lot of you lately, have I?” he asked, unfolding his napkin, and sizing up the room.…

“Well, there’s a reason I haven’t seen a lot of you Rick.” He was the only one to call me Rick, rather than Harry, for Herrick. “I have been traveling an unconscionable amount.” This was said for the blond woman as much as for me. “They don’t know yet whether I’ll be one of the linchpins in Europe or the Far East.”

Now the man in the pencil-strip suit began his counteroffensive. He must have put a curve on what he said, for the woman gave a low intimate laugh. In response, my father leaned toward me across the table and whispered, “They’ve given OPC the covert operations.”

What’s covert?” I whispered back.

“The real stuff. None of that counterespionage where you drink out of my teacup and I drink out of yours. This is war. Without declaring it.” …

(pp. 115-116)

[The letter]

“Yes, one more thing,” I said. “You mentioned that you would let me see Rosen’s letters.”

“Why do you want to see them now?”

I shrugged. “For diversion.”

“Yes,” he said. “that’s right. All right.” But I could see he was reluctant. He went to his room, closed the door, came out, locked the door, and handed me a thick envelope. “Read it tonight,” he said. “And when you’re done, slip it under the sill.”

“I’ll read in this room,” I said, “and if anybody unfamiliar knocks, anyone official, that is, I’ll put the letter under your door before I go to answer.”

“Approved,” he said.

Dear Dix,

Well, here I am on hotshot duty in TSS, and there you are, honcho number one to the big man in Berlin. Congratulations. The old training group PQ 31 is doing all right for itself, even if PQ has to stand for peculiar—which is what I can say about my work now. Dix, procedure and any other I send you, is BAP (which in case you forgot is Burn After Perusal). I don’t know if work at TSS deserves to be as hush-hush as is presented to us here, but it is certainly a special place. Only geniuses need apply—how did they ever miss you? (Before you get too pissed off, recognize that I mean it.) The overseer for all us Mensa types is Hugh Montague, the old OSS legend, and he’s an odd one, as remote as Mt. Everest, confident as God. I can’t imagine what would happen if you ever tangled with him. Anyway, TSS is but part of his demesne, which I deliver as a gift to you love of big words. (Demesne is the etymological origin of domain, that is, the lands belonging to the Lord for which he pays no rent.) Montague, so far as I can see, pays no rent.) He reports only to Dulles. Over at Top Sanctum Sanctorum (true meaning of TSS), we tend to be savage our opinions of everybody, but on Montague, we agree. Unlike many in the Company, he is no dedicated brwon-noser.

…back to TSS. I find an unholy desire to tell you about the worst fiasco we ever had, which is why this letter has to be Ultra—BAP [Burn After Perusal]. It could fry my kishkes if read by the wrong eyes. Do not bother about the meaning of kishkes. That is argot from Yiddish and will advance nothing you’re interested in. I mention it only because the nominal head of TSS is named Gottlieb, and kishkes is the only Jewish word I ever heard him use. Of course, they assigned me to him — I guess they figure we have something in common. Well, not all that much. Some Jews are deep in tradition like my family, which is half religious-orthodox, half socialist — typically Jewish, ha, ha — but some Jews go in the other direction. They become mirrors of their culture. (Like me!) Disraeli, the British Prime Minister under Queen Victoria, born of Jewish parents, but they say he had the best upper-class English accent of anyone in the British Isles.

Well, Gottlieb is like that except he’s cosmic in scope, interested in everything. Odd! He lives on a farm outside of Washington and gets up every morning to milk his goats. The farmhouse itself used to be a slave cabin, but Gottlieb is a Sunday carpenter, so it’s big enough now to house his family. Mrs. Gottlieb, incidentally, spent her childhood in India. That may be the explanation for the goats! She’s the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries. Gottlieb also raises Christmas trees. And he has a clubfoot, but loves all the same to square dance. He’s only a chemist with a degree from City College, but he’s nonetheless a genius. Which is why in summary he sounds like nothing but pieces and parts. I must say, he messed up. Of course, only a genius can when in concert with another genius like Hugh Montague. It actually happened three years ago, but it’s still the worst-kept secret at TSS. You can’t go out with a colleague for a drink and get a little intimate without being told The Story. I find it interesting. There’s some principle of reverse-morale here. Montague is so elevated that I think The Story makes him human for us. Of course he only failed in a judgment call. He put his bet on Gottlieb, and Sidney did the damage.

Here’s the gen. (Old OSS word for poop.) Three years ago the big rumor at TSS was that the Sovs had synthesized some magic drug. They could not only control the behavior of their agents, but could fix a spy’s memory to self-destruct upon capture. They also had schizophrenia-inducing chemicals to free their agents from all moral concerns. Isn’t this what Communism is all about anyway! The magic drug is in the ideology! Anyway, Gottlieb had come upon a physical substance that turns a few corners in schizophrenia. It is called lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD for short, and TSS people harbor the hope that it will become our wonder drug, since present techniques of debriefing enemy agents are too slow. Allen Dulles wants a chemical spigot to turn a defector on and off. Kind of a truth cocktail. LSD inspires one to tell the truth.

Now, it’s hard to be sure, Dix, because I only acquired this at several removes, but Gottlieb seems to have had a honey of a theory, worked out in collaboration with Mrs. Montague and her theories. It is built on the premise that the psychic wall which schizophrenia builds to close off communication between opposite parts of the personality is composed of an immense number of lies, and the truth is encysted behind it. Any drug that can induce schizophrenia might also, if used on a start-stop -start-stop basis, induce enough of a vibration in the lies of that schizophrenic wall to shake it and, conceivably, crack it. More normal people, in contrast, only choose the lies that will keep their ego intact. By the Gottlieb-Gardiner theory, a defector’s wall, whether psychotic or normal, can be shattered by the use of LSD. First, however, Gottlieb had to test the compatibility of LSD to his purpose. He and a few colleagues tried it on one another, but they were aware of the experiment. Unwitting LSD recipients were what was needed.

So, one night at a small cocktail party a TSS researcher managed to slip ad’s of LSD into a pony of Cointreau that a contract scientist was drinking. The victim was not witting of the experiment. Now, I don’t know his name — that fact is sealed, but let’s call him what he is — VICTIM.

As it turned out, he did not react well. VICTIM returned to his home in a state of agitation. A very disciplined man, he fought the effects of the LSD. No symptoms of overt derangement presented themselves. The only manifestation was that he could not sleep. Then he began to tell his wife that he had made terrible mistakes. Only he could not specify what they were. After a couple of days, he was so agitated that Gottlieb sent him to New York to see one of our psychiatrists. Gottlieb’s own deputy stayed with VICTIM in a New York hotel room. VICTIM, however, got worse and worse. Finally, right in front of his keeper, he took a running dive through a closed window and crashed ten stories to his death. They gave his widow and children a government pension, and Gottlieb got away with a slap on the wrist. Montague sent a memo to Dulles: Formal punishment would tend to interfere with ‘that most necessary spirit of initiative and outright enthusiasm so prerequisite to this work.’ Dulles did send a personal letter to Gottlieb scolding him for poor judgment, but no copy of this letter — at least so goes the gen — ever landed in Gottlieb’s file. Sidney is in fine shape at TSS these days.

I had a strong reaction to the letter. I could read no further. The fear that I was being used by Harlot in careless fashion had just been confirmed. VICTIM kept falling in my mind.
(pp. 344-348)

[“Wet jobs” and termination experiments]

So I went on to TSS with Allen [Dulles’] blessing and Hugh’s strong arm around my waist. I was prepared to dive into the dark depths, but, of course, as soon as I finished training, they wrapped me in cotton. Technical Services Staff, as you can guess, is as highly compartmentalized as any place you’re going to work in the Agency. Even now, after five years in TSS’s recessive folds, I still can’t decide such basic things as whether we go in for wet jobs, or leaving assassination quite to the side, whether we indulge in even worse deeds, such as honest-to-god termination experiments. If one were to believe the more sinister gossip, it’s true. Of course, such rumors do come to me in the large from Arnie Rosen, and I’m not sure he’s always to be trusted. (He loves wild stories too much.!)
(p. 502)

CLOSE

Frank Olson: The Man Who Fell 13 Stories

Chapter 3, of
A Voice for the Dead: A Forensic Investigator’s Pursuit of the Truth in the Grave
By James E. Starrs with Katherine Ramsland
(G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 2005) Used with permission of the author

We grow accustomed to the Dark—
When light is put away…

The Bravest—grope a little—
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead—
But as they learn to see—

Either the Darkness alters
Or something in the sight…

—Emily Dickinson

1

He was a conflicted man living in conflicted times who died leaving conflicting leads.

When a forty-three-year-old man falls thirteen stories from a hotel room window in mid-town New York City, to his death, it may seem to be a daunting task to determine the true circumstances of his death, especially after his being buried for more than 40 years. Yet after exhuming and examining his remains a specific injury that went undetected at the time of his death turned out to be an important lead in re-evaluating the manner of the man’s death.

Not only had the elite government scientist whose death was in question not died in the manner officially described, his body did not bear the injuries stated in his autopsy report. Upon discovering these new and troubling facts, many questions arose, such as whether this “suicidal leap” (the deceased being referred to in the parlance of officialdoms as a jumper) had been related to his employment resignation, which was offered only a few days before the incident. Had he found out something he was not supposed to know?

These questions remained for my scientific team to try to answer, and once the victim’s family asked for my aid, told me what they knew, and then warned me, “Now of course, you know you’re taking on the C.I.A,” I began walking with my back to the wall, any wall would do for cover.

What seemed to be at first glance a simple and straight-forward set of events leading to a death turned out to be much more complicated than had been anticipated, including the occurrence of yet more mysterious deaths.

2

The victim under scrutiny was Frank Olson, Ph.D. who had died sometime after midnight on November 28, 1953, on the Seventh Avenue sidewalk outside New York’s Hotel Statler. Robert Lashbrook, Ph.D. who was with Olson on that fateful night, recounted his version of the events leading up to and occurring at the tragic moment many times: Lashbrook and Olson were together in Room 1018A on the 10th floor, actually the 13th when the first three unnumbered floors are counted, when Dr. Olson suddenly went out the room’s only window. In his initial version of the events, Lashbrook insisted that he had been asleep at the time, and that he awoke to the sound of crashing glass. Only then did he realize that Dr. Olson had catapulted through the room’s closed window, apparently bent on suicide.

A New York City assistant medical examiner, Dr. Dominick De Maio, confirmed Lashbrook’s recital, stating in his report of his external (not internal) examination of Olson’s body that there were many compound fractures of Olson’s extremities and multiple lacerations on his face and neck as well as his lower extremities. This report was filed, was uncontested, and as such, became the official record. Yet there were perturbing features surrounding Olson’s death that only gradually came to light over a span of many years during which the Olson family tried to unlock what they were convinced was a more terrible truth about his death.

Eric Olson, Dr. Olson’s elder surviving son, was nine years old at the time of his father’s unexpected death. On the morning after the incident, he learned from his father’s government boss, Colonel Vincent Ruwet, that his father had died in a work-related accident that had occurred in a hotel. He had either “fallen or jumped,” but young Eric could not understand the full importance of what that meant. Over the years, as he came to think about the claim that his father’s death resulted from a “fatal nervous breakdown,” he discovered that his father had been an employee of the C.I.A. engaged in sinister and clandestine research activities of a biochemical nature.

The Olson family was in 1953 living on the verge of Frederick, Maryland, while Frank Olson was employed as a biochemist at nearby Fort Detrick, the Army’s premier bacteriological warfare research installation. Since 1943, he had been part of a team of scientists who were immersed in a top-secret program aimed toward developing lethal biological and chemical weapons for America’s defense during the Cold War, a subject considered to be a matter of utmost secrecy for the protection of national security.

In 1949, Frank Olson had helped to set up the Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick, where written records were forbidden and only a trusted few were allowed to know about the more sensitive projects. Olson was tasked to develop new and secret biological means for effective interrogation and warfare. Olson soon became the acting head of this division. Among its projects, according to what Eric’s research taught him, were the development of assassination materials, collaboration with former Nazi scientists, LSD mind control research, and the use of biological weapons during the Korean War. The ominous nature of such mind-control research was exposed to public view in the Hollywood movie “The Manchurian Candidate,” starring the late Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey.

Eric remembers that his mother was uncomfortable about the work her husband was doing. He is of a mind that his father had expressed distress over experiments he was conducting and the possible use of the results. While a great deal about his activities remained unknown to his family, apparently during the weekend preceding his death Frank Olson had been uncharacteristically distraught, he being a person of considerable cheerfulness and bonhomie. He had come home early from a meeting at a mountain retreat and he had said something to his wife, Alice, about “a terrible mistake” he had made while presenting a paper at the meeting. He seemed deeply and singularly anxious about it but he would not reveal the nature of his mistake. According to Mrs. Olson, he felt certain that his career was in jeopardy and he had decided to resign.

Yet when he returned from work the next day, he told Alice that his colleagues had reassured him. Consequently he withdrew his resignation letter. However, he said it was recommended that he obtain treatment for some newly emergent behavioral problems he was having. The plan of action included his seeing a psychiatrist. Otherwise, he said, she might not be safe with him under the same roof. Alice Olson was stunned. Nothing in his demeanor had indicated that he was dangerous. But he did not explain what he meant any further. It was only two days before Thanksgiving, 1953 but, notwithstanding the importance of his family holiday he insisted he needed to leave for treatment. He believed he would return in time for Thanksgiving dinner.

The next day an official SOD car came to convey Frank Olson to New York. Alice joined her husband during the 30plus mile trip to Washington, where she saw her husband enplane for New York. He was accompanied by his boss, Vincent Ruwet and a stranger who was introduced to her as Dr. Robert Lashbrook.

In New York City, at 58th Street, Olson reportedly had several sessions with a medical doctor that lasted most of the day. He and Dr. Lashbrook had Thanksgiving dinner in New York, but Olson telephoned his wife on Friday and told her he expected to be home that Saturday. He was contemplating entering a psychiatric hospital in Washington for treatment. But his plans were not to be. That night he died in New York City. He was 43, and left behind a wife and three young children, two sons, Eric and Nils, and a daughter, Lisa.

His death being ruled a suicide, his body was sent home to Maryland for a burial. His casket was at all times kept closed due, so the family was informed, to the massive injuries he sustained in his fatal fall. Frank Olson was buried in a solemn ceremony on December 1, 1953 in Linden Hills Cemetery n Frederick, Maryland where a stone monument was put in place to his memory.

For twenty odd years, the Olson family remained in a state of perplexity about these events. In her grief Alice Olson took drinking to excess, ultimately becoming an alcoholic.

His father’s sudden death haunted Eric, who was now the man of the house. He felt certain that his father had not deliberately jumped out the window, but he was at a loss as to how to resolve his suspicions.

Then on June 11, 1975, a front-page article in the Washington Post engaged his excited attention. Now after the passage of so many years since his father’s death, the political scene in Washington, D.C. had changed. No longer were people afraid of Soviet biological warfare. In fact, many people had expressed distrust of the government’s conduct of the Cold War and were rooting out past secrets, some of which were shameful and unethical. This Post newspaper report, revealing the results of the Rockefeller Commission’s findings about illegal C.I.A. activities, noted that a civilian employee of the Department of the Army had jumped from the tenth floor of a New York hotel after he was surreptitiously given the hallucinogenic drug, LSD. “This individual,” the article stated, “had not been made aware he had been given LSD until twenty minutes after it had been administered.” It had been part of a larger C.I.A. orchestrated project that had involved the administration of psychoactive drugs to numerous unsuspecting Americans.

The victim’s name was not disclosed, but the description of the incident was too similar to the circumstances of Frank Olson’s death for Eric to ignore. He showed the article to the rest of his family. He proceeded with direct inquiries to Vincent Ruwet, who had been his father’s supervisor at Fort Detrick. Indeed he had visited with Alice Olson often after her husband’s death, purporting to sense and share her grief.

Ruwet reluctantly admitted that the unnamed man in the Post’s article was in fact Frank Olson. He had been a guinea pig in a CIA sponsored testing of LSD at a retreat at Deep Creek Lodge in rural Maryland. Afterward, when he seemed to be suffering from serious side effects, the C.I.A. had decided to seek treatment for him, taking him to New York for that purpose. Before it was completed, however, he had jumped to his death, so Ruwet maintained.

In righteous outrage, the Olson family invited the media to a press conference in July 1975 to announce their intention of suing the government for its complicity in the wrongful death of Frank Olson. It was hoped the media attention would pressure the C.I.A. to make a full disclosure of Olson’s tragic death. Alice made the first statement, indicating that she believed her husband must have been suffering from some sort of bad dream to have jumped as said through a closed window. Then Eric recalled that the family had never been told any of the details, that they had been callously deceived, and that they wanted to know why a cover-up had been in place all these years.

Four days later, an invitation to the White House arrived. In a meeting that lasted less than twenty minutes, President Gerald Ford offered a complete and uncompromising apology and urged the government to grant the family 3⁄4 of a million dollars as a monetary settlement. The President also ordered the C.I.A. Director William Colby to cooperate with them.

When the family, in due course, met with Colby, who later reported that this had been among the most difficult assignments he had ever had, he offered them 150 pages of redacted documents that he claimed amounted to the entire file that was relevant to their concerns. It was the C.I.A.’s investigation into Frank Olson’s death. He believed it would answer any questions they might have. He seemed unaware of the importance of what he was giving them, for the material soon raised more questions than it answered. It became clear to them that there was something darker in this tragic incident than a failed LSD experiment.

3

Pouring over the documents in which many lines and names were blacked out, the Olsons believed that significant information about their father’s death was still missing. There was no explanation in these pages, for example, about why the C.I.A. agents had bundled Frank Olson off to a New York City hotel rather than a hospital. If he had been in such a self destructive frame of mind, why was his supposed escort asleep when he exited the room through the window? And why, when he went out the window, had Lashbrook failed to summon help or even notify the hotel’s staff? The family now came to the painful realization that Frank Olson might have been murdered. But if so, what was the motive for such a nefarious deed?

In their questing for the truth they discovered that C.I.A. higher-up Sidney Gottlieb, Ph.D., who was officially reprimanded for the handling of the Olson incident, had been involved in C.I.A. assassination plots on national leaders and was an enthusiastic supporter of mind control. Gottlieb’s experiments occurred at a time in our country’s history when no act performed with a view toward thwarting communism was considered out-of-bounds. The standoff between these two world powers meant that survival was seen as the end that justified all means, including the development of biological weapons and mental manipulation. Intelligence reports had the Soviets on the fast track and the Americans playing catch up. The C.I.A.’s activities were disguised in projects bearing innocuous names that concealed their actual purpose.

Passages in the documents they had received pertaining to a C.I.A. operation called “Project Bluebird” and renamed ARTICHOKE were deleted, but Eric Olson plumbed the depths from other sources. ARTICHOKE had involved extreme methods of interrogation and an attempt to develop a way to produce complete amnesia in questioned subjects or in agents who had seen too much and could no longer be trusted. It was also disclosed that Olson was not just a “civilian scientist” with the Army but a full-fledged C.I.A. employee. He had been an agent in a powerful position and possessing detailed covert information.

The laboratory experiment in which Frank Olson had unwittingly participated had been part of a “truth drug” program, supervised by Sidney Gottlieb and George Hunter White, which involved getting people to disclose all under the influence of a drug clandestinely administered. If the C.I.A. found the right drug, they could use it to extract secrets from enemy agents as well as learn how to protect their own agents against such disclosures. They had started with the active ingredient in marijuana and moved on to more dangerous drugs, like LSD once the program directors decided that informed subjects could not give authentic results, agents had administered LSD in large doses to unsuspecting soldiers at the Edgewood Arsenal and to unconsenting civilians in hospitals. The C.I.A. managers offered emoluments to universities soliciting their involvements. For the purposes of this research, some people were kept in a hallucinogenic state for days at a time.

At the New York Psychiatric Institute in January 1953, less than a year before Olson died, other experiments had been conducted. Harold Blauer, a tennis professional, went there for depression. He became one of the guinea pigs, but his reaction to the LSD spelled disaster for him. After a bad reaction, he succumbed to a coma and in short order died.

Operation Realism, a top-secret project run by George White, involved giving citizens in bars and restaurants LSD without their knowledge. White even set up massage parlors for Operation Midnight Climax another C.I.A. program as a way to lure people into their LSD experiments.

Frank Olson was described in these heavily redacted reports as one of the C.I.A’s guinea pigs, making him a victim. But being so involved in its operation, he would hardly have been an easy target. Nevertheless, the report described how on November 19, 1953, Gottlieb or someone acting at his behest had slipped the drug into Olson’s glass of Cointreau at Deep Creek Lodge. After twenty minutes, Olson was said to have developed hallucinations, after which he was told that he had been a subject in their experimenting. By morning, he was still in an agitated state.

After his return home in a dispirited and depressed state, he went to work and told Ruwet of his intention to resign. Ruwet indicated to investigators that he had appeared to be “all mixed up.” He and Lashbrook then took Olson to New York. Instead of being under the care of a qualified psychiatrist, Olson was taken to Harold Abramson, an allergist with a C.I.A. clearance who was a firm believer in the therapeutic value of LSD for psychiatric patients. At one point he apparently gave Olson bourbon and the sedative nembutal both central nervous system depressants whose adjuvant affect could have killed Olson. The sleep they might have induced in him could have been his last.

By some accounts, Olson might also have met a magician by the name of John Mulholland, who may have tried to use hypnosis on him. Ruwet told investigators that Olson became highly agitated and paranoid while New York. He spent one night wandering the streets, and at one point he discarded his wallet and his identification papers asking to be allowed to “disappear.” Ruwet said that Olson did not want to go home to face his wife. Yet the next day, he called his wife to assure her that he was better and expected to see her the following day.

Lashbrook reported to the police who were investigating Olson’s death that he, Olson, worked for the Defense Department, and that Olson had been calm that evening, washing out his socks in the sink before going to bed.

Yet, four hours later, Olson fell (sic) to his death.

As part of the police investigation Lashbrook was taken to the 14th Precinct station house, spending only a brief period there. He told the police that he did not know why Olson had killed himself, except that he did suffer from ulcers. The detectives asked him to empty his pockets but did not keep a record of what they found. However, a Security Office report indicated that he had airline ticket stubs for the trips that he and Olson had taken, and a receipt for $115, dated November 25, 1953 and signed by John Mulholland. Supposedly this was an advance for travel to Chicago.

Lashbrook also had hotel bills and papers with phone numbers, including those for Vince Ruwet and Dr. Abramson. In addition, he had an address for a house on Bedford Street that was used for Operation Midnight Climax. One sheet of paper had New York City addresses for people identified only by the initials G.W., M.H., and J.M. Lashbrook said that for security reasons, he preferred not to reveal who they were. The detectives apparently did not press the matter.

Since John Mulholland had died in 1970, there was no way for the Olsons to interview him about his possible involvement in this tragedy. However, he had been under contract to prepare a manual, “Some Operational Applications of the Art of Deception,” that applied the magician’s art to covert activities, such as slipping drugs into drinks. There was no record of the actual manual having been produced.

Right after Olson’s death, the C.I.A. sent five investigators to New York, without explaining why they would send so many in the case of an outright, uncontested suicide. An internal memo the following week refers to Olson’s “suicide” in quotation marks, as if the memo’s author was aware that it had not been a suicide. And one of the phone numbers that Lashbrook carried that fateful night was for George White, the man in charge of the program, whose alias was Morgan Hall. Lashbrook’s immediate boss was Sidney Gottlieb. Although George White operated a CIA safe house in Greenwich Village, only minutes from the Hotel Statler, where Olson and Lashbrook had taken lodging, they apparently did not visit it.

The investigating team recommended disciplinary action against Lashbrook and Gottlieb, but while Lashbrook left the agency, Gottlieb remained in power for the next two decades. (He can be said to have dismissed Olson’s death during hearings in 1977 as one of the risks of running such experiments.)

The Olson family was disturbed by what they had learned. Although the men who were investigated had claimed that Frank Olson was in a suicidal frame of mind, they had roomed him on a high floor. He had even managed to slip away from them one night, a good indication that they were not really watching him. On Thanksgiving Day, they had found him in a shell-shocked state in the hotel lobby. Dr. Abramson had diagnosed him as psychotic and recommended hospitalization. Yet he remained in the hotel for two more nights.

Piecing these facts together, Eric Olson thought that Lashbrook’s account was implausible. He decided to investigate on his own. So in 1984, he went to the Hotel Statler (now the Hotel Pennsylvania) to see the room for himself. It was a basic hotel room with two double beds, small and rather spare in its furnishings. He could not imagine how anyone could have gotten a running start in such a room without awakening the person in the next bed—the man who was posted there to watch Eric’s supposedly delusional and suicidal father. The sill was high and there was a radiator right in front of it. The shade had also been pulled down. He wondered if it was in the realm of possibility to break through the window with so little space allowed to gain momentum and so many obstructions at the window.

Experts later told Eric that a man would have to be running more than thirty miles per hour to crash through such a window and the hotel room was too short for even an accomplished athlete to accomplish it.

Another mystery that seemed to be part of Olson’s November death involved the trip that he had taken overseas during the prior summer. Again, the family had to piece together different sources of information to understand his travels. He had been to Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain, that was certain. But for what purpose?

In London, Eric learned from a reporter that his father had talked with an expert on brainwashing about something he had witnessed at research installations in Frankfurt. Eric was led to believe that these facilities tested human subjects, called “expendables”— who were enemy agents or collaborators and that they sometimes died from the experiments. Perhaps Frank Olson had voiced his dismay and disgust over this inhumane behavior and was for that reason considered a potential security risk. Alice recalled that when Frank returned from Europe that summer, he was unusually withdrawn and morose and contemplative.

To Eric, the newly revealed facts painted a grim picture of his father’s death having been a C.I.A. staged suicide. The C.I.A. operatives may have slipped the LSD into his father’s drink to get him talking, and once they saw his reaction, decided to get him to New York where the suicide could be faked convincingly.

That was the hypothesis he felt was cementing itself into place.

Yet even before this new angle could be explored more thoroughly the Olson family was visited by yet another tragedy—one that was indirectly instrumental in bringing me into this steamy John Carre-like brew. To tell that story, I ask the reader’s indulgence in my turning the clock back a few years.

4

The Olson family and I were linked in a friendly, social relationship through Greg Hayward, a student of mine at George Washington University’s law school. Greg had married Eric Olson’s sister, Lisa.

Greg was a rugged and totally engaging outdoorsman who had served as an Airborne Ranger in Vietnam. We were biking companions, and also went rock climbing and rappelling. He owned a farm in Frederick Maryland, to which I would journey with my family on many occasions. But during that time I knew nothing about the death of Frank Olson or the family’s sustained grief over it, a grief which they keep well closeted from me.

Gregg was readying himself for a run for Congress. I have no doubt his likeable and knowledgeable personality would have carried the day for him. Lisa was active as a teacher for the deaf. They were a wonderful, much-loved couple with a young son, Jonathan. It was a joy to know them.

One day in 1978, Greg came to my university office, his face glowing, and his smile evoking the best of news.

“I’m here to tell you,” he said, “that the government has paid the Olson family close to a million dollars for their wrongdoing in causing the death of Frank Olson.”

Surprised and curious, I invited him to tell me more about it, and so he did, putting me on notice of the circumstances of Frank Olson’s death. I congratulated him on the government’s fessing up for their wrongdoing and his finding solace in it. The moment was one to be savored by him and the Olson family.

Shortly thereafter Greg called to invite me to join him in an airplane trip to the Adirondacks where he had a cottage. I was sorely tempted to join him and his family since I had once before visited his remote cabin and felt the memory of that good time tugging me to go.

But I was compelled to decline, my classes at the University demanding my attention. Reluctantly he accepted me decision. He signed off with one of his favorite expressions. “Remember Jim,” he excited, “danger is no stranger to an Airborne Ranger.” As it turned out that was the last conversation I ever had with Greg Hayward.

That same night, I received another phone call from another former student, Hugh Lewis, stating that the plane carrying Greg to the Adirondack retreat had encountered a sudden, unexpected snowstorm causing it to crash into a mountainside. Both Greg and Lisa, their two-year-old son, Jonathan, and the child that Lisa was carrying had died in the crash, the entire family wiped out.

And if I had not been so stuffy, so wedded to my faculty duties, I would have gone, too. This tragedy stayed with me as did my questioning the reason for the fate that had saved me. Would there come a time when I would be called to repay my good fortune?
Then in 1993, Alice Olson died. This was the impetus for Eric to act more aggressively on his unflagging suspicions over his father’s death. The knock once again came at my office door from a member of the Olson family. This time it was Eric who was familiar to me due to my cycling excursions to Greg Hayward’s farm.

Eric explained to me that his mother, Alice, had been buried in Mount Olivet cemetery in Frederick, Maryland while his father, Frank, had been interred in 1953 in Linden Hills Cemetery, also in Frederick. It was his wish, which he articulated with his usual enthusiasm, to remove his father’s remains to the Mount Olivet cemetery so that, in death, they could be reunited. But, at the same time, he was quite obviously suffused with another, even more compelling, desire.

Eric represented in a very straightforward way and with a calm and determined mind that he and his brother, Nils, wanted to have their father’s remains scientifically scrutinized to see if modern methods of analysis could provide tangible evidence of the underlying cause and manner of his death. “We want to find out if we can learn more than we already know,” he emphasized.
Eric’s request, even entreaty, was entitled to and received my immediate and careful attention. I cautioned him that I would coordinate and oversee the project only if my exacting criteria for an exhumation were fulfilled. He was entirely agreeable to that arrangement.

From what I could determine from many background sources, there was certainly substantial controversy over whether Frank Olson’s death was an accident, a suicide or, more ominously, a homicide. Further the fact that no autopsy had been performed on Olson militated in favor of our discovering new and possibly determinative evidence to shed new light on his death. It was also clear that all of the immediate family supported this project.

The first step involved a word by word examination of the New York City medical examiner’s report, rendered in 1953, on the death of Dr. Olson. With the necessary consent of Eric Olson, I secured a copy which revealed its author to be Dr. Dominick Di Maio later to become the New York City medical examiner. His report was most abbreviated since the death had been “no posted,” (reported out based only on an external examination of Olson’s dead body). The accompanying toxicological report only assayed the presence of methyl and ethyl alcohol in the liver, with negative results, and included no drug scan of any kind. Those were strong indicia that a thorough autopsy could potentially accomplish something more than previously-contingent on the condition of Olson’s remains. That condition, for good or for ill, was the most uncertain and the most significant aspect of this as it is in any exhumation, especially where the time elapsed since burial is prolonged.

Seeking to flesh out the particulars of Di Maio’s written report, I telephoned him in New York City and found him to be cordial and candid. He conceded that no x-rays had been taken at the time of his examining the remains. As he put it, he had been “taken in” by the reports he received that this death was an uncomplicated out-and-out suicide. Indeed, in the 1970s, after the Washington Post’s revelations, his ire over learning that he had been misled resulted in his contemplating revisiting the death of Dr. Olson. But other matters had pre-empted his time.

These discussions with Dr. Di Maio, along with my review of the vast documentary evidence regarding Dr. Olson’s death and the congressional investigations into it, convinced me that an exhumation was warranted.

Three main objectives loomed largest in my approach to this exhumation:

1. To give the Olson family confidence that all available scientific and investigative means had been employed to bring the truth about Frank Olson’s death under public and scientific scrutiny;

2. To provide a forum for the utilization of new or under-utilized scientific technologies and experiences, such as the bio-engineering aspects of a fall from a height, an analysis of the causal features in fractures resulting from such a fall, a toxicological analysis of bodily tissues and hair for therapeutic and abused drugs (whether defined as “controlled substances” or not), the use of the computer to animate a re-enactment scenario of the event, and to provide an identification of the remains by a computerized skull superimposition.

3. To examine and to ponder whether the tragedy of scientific experimentation with the lives and well-being of unwitting persons which marred and stigmatized this C.I.A. research enterprise might conceivably be replicated in today’s society.

But first it was requisite to obtain written and notarized authorizations for the exhumation and analysis of the remains from Eric and Nils Olson, as the two surviving children. Fulfilling any legal requirements in Maryland for an exhumation was next in my line of investigative fire. As I have found in other states the Maryland statutory provisions governing exhumations are haphazard, spotty and unclear. For clarity I went to a presumed reliable source – the state’s medical examiner’s office in Baltimore. After explaining my interest in removing Frank Olson from one cemetery and his reburial in another cemetery, beside his wife, I was directed to the local district attorney for Frederick County.

That contact, by phone and mail, was cordial and cooperative in the sense that no court order approving the exhumation was deemed necessary. Of course, it is fair to say that if the full details of the exhumation had been demanded of me a different attitude and result might have ensued. The autopsy and its sequelae which were to intervene between the exhumation and the reburial were not featured in my approaches to the legal authorities in Maryland. Whether the investigation would have been stymied or side-tracked if all had been told I cannot say, but it is probable that Frank Olson’s remains would not have been housed above ground under lock and key in my office and in that of Dr. Jack Levisky at York College, Pennsylvania over the nearly ten year span that transpired until his reburial.

With these preliminaries accomplished by October 1993, I proceeded to assemble a team of qualified and eminent specialists in the multiple scientific disciplines that would be put to the task in this investigation.

The total came to fifteen. Dr. “Jack” (James) Frost, a West Virginia Medical Examiner, agreed to perform the autopsy at the Hagerstown (Md) Community College, arranged through the contacts made by Jeff Kercheval, a criminalist with the Hagerstown police lab, who served on the team. Geologist George Stevens, Ph.D. of The George Washington University was in charge of any geological assessments. Yale Caplan Ph.D., a former President of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, would perform the toxicological analyses. Michael Calhoun, a radiolographer with Shady Grove (Md) Adventist Hospital would do the x-raying. Jean Gardner Esq., stood by for her legal insights, along with three photographers, including Gerry Richards, a retired chief of the photography section at the FBI and a former student of mine in the MFS curriculum at George Washington University.

Last to mention but always in the forefront throughout the project was Dr. “Jack” John Levisky, a forensic anthropologist and department chairman at York College, PA. A scientific consultant, and an assortment of support staff were also used. Some of these people would become regulars with me in my future exhumations.
I provided the background on the case to each person and all of them responded with alacrity to my invitation, even after hearing the many complexities and, possibly imponderables that lurked on the horizon. Each team member deserves the highest praise and has my most genuine and entirely unreserved gratitude for their selfless, uncompensated labors in our attempts to disentangle this mystery.

All was now in readiness.

I organized the project in my usual bi-level manner. On one level, the below ground one, it was strictly a scientific investigation. On another level, the above ground one, it partook of investigations into the facts and circumstances of Olson’s death. In combination with the scientific findings the above ground investigations would contribute to a better understanding of how Dr. Frank R. Olson came to his death. Those above ground investigations would include securing interviews, with people with knowledge of the incident.

My foremost interest was to locate the whereabouts of persons present at the Hotel Statler on the night Frank Olson had died. I focused on the Statler’s night manager, Armand Pastore, who first found Dr. Olson lying supine and barely alive on the 7th Avenue west-side sidewalk; the Statler’s telephone operator, who overheard Dr. Lashbrook’s call from room 1018A following Olson’s exiting the window; the priest from the nearby Roman Catholic Church who had given Dr. Olson the Last Rites as he lay dying on the sidewalk; and the New York City police officer on the beat who had responded to the death scene. As the investigations progressed others would be added to the list of interviewees, including the C.I.A’s mandarin for clandestine research projects, Sidney Gottlieb.

While the above ground investigations proceeded, the exhumation was given the go-ahead.

The Exhumation
5

The exhumation at Linden Hills Cemetery took place on Thursday, June 2, 1994, commencing at 8:30 A.M, under clear skies and in the presence of the Olson brothers, my team members, representatives of the press and a smallish group of voyeurs. We removed the metal coffin from the grave without incident, and transported the unopened coffin to the nearby (30 miles plus west) Hagerstown Police Department Crime Laboratory for the unveiling of the remains and for Michael Calhoun and his wife to perform their radiographic wizardry.

On Friday, we transported the remains to the biology department at Hagerstown Junior College where we would conduct the autopsy, analyze the skeletal features and obtain specimens for toxicological analysis.

Upon opening the coffin, the remains proved to be immaculately well preserved, albeit mummified, under a tight wrapping of linen acting as a full body shroud. We were able to look at the body as if the incident had happened only yesterday. We did not observe the slightest sign of mold or decay. After some forty years in the grave, despite embalming, one expects that the coffin’s interior dampness from the moisture resulting from the release of body fluids would have produced some mildew and that the body would have begun to putrefy.

Yet there is never any assurance as to the condition of the remains overtime, the type of coffin used, and the preservative qualities of the embalming fluid, keeping decay at bay for sixty years plus or minus, are just two factors to take into account. I have seen corpses in much worse condition with a lesser time period in between burial and exhumation. But such was not the case here, probably because of the lack of the disruption of an autopsy on the remains and the care taken to preserve the remains for interstate transfer from New York City to Frederick, Maryland.

On other occasions the remains of persons long dead have been exhumed and surprisingly, even startlingly, seen to be fully fleshed and well-preserved although mummified. The finding and the opening in Paris, France in 1905 of the leaden coffin of American Naval hero John Paul Jones, some 113 years after his death was one such instance. His preservation is best explained by Ambassador Porter who reported to the Secretary of State that “the body fortunately was found well-preserved, the coffin having been filled with alcohol but which had evaporated.” Of course, like Frank Olson, the linen winding sheet in which both he and John Paul Jones had been wrapped was added protection against post-mortem decay.

In the first instance our attention was drawn to Olson’s face and neck. I saw no lacerations there, nary a one, although Dr. Di Maio’s report had indicated the presence of “multiple abrasions and lacerations.” While we were examining the remains prior to the autopsy, Eric Olson arrived and insisted on viewing his father’s remains. Although it is the standard practice to keep the relatives out of the autopsy room I made an exception in this case due to my noticing the uncanny resemblance between Eric in life and his father in death.

Seeing Eric standing beside his father’s remains gave me a start for one was a look-a-like for the other, in the same way that civil rights leader Medgar Evers and his son were seen to be duplicates of each other when Medgar Evers was exhumed from his grave in Arlington National Cemetery.

The Olson family had been advised against an open casket funeral cemetery on the advice of Dr. Olson’s superiors who had represented that his injuries were too gruesome to behold. Yet on our close inspection there was no evidence of such injuries. That was a matter of some considerable consternation. How could Dr. Di Maio have reported the existence of multiple lacerations when, in truth and in fact, there were none?

Further, the entire anterior (front) portion from head to toe of the flesh of Frank Olson’s remains was devoid of lacerations, save those to be expected from the many compound fractures, and from that in the upper thoracic region where a laceration had been sutured up, probably during embalming.

The significance of this absence of lacerations is less a criticism of Dr. Di Maio than a commentary on the way Dr. Olson exited through the window. Certainly going through an open window would be one feasible explanation, because if it had been closed, it is reasonable to expect that the glass would have cut his skin at some place or other. If a drawn shade separated the glass from the flesh, then perhaps the shade buffered kept the glass from piercing Olson’s underwear-clad body, but it is nevertheless inexplicable that we found no cuts on the front of the lower extremities from dragging across glass shards on the bottom edge of the window.

The literature reporting on broken-glass type burglaries reveals that the broken glass causes lacerations most frequently when the body, generally an arm inserted through the broken glass to open a door or window to facilitate the burglar’s entry, withdraws from the broken window.

For the moment, we could only say that it is most probable either that Dr. Olson went to his death through an open window or that he went through a closed window with a shade drawn in front of it. The lack of lacerations gives only an immeasurable edge to the open window hypothesis.

We turned our attention to the head. It is altogether improbable that Dr. Olson would have gone unresisting to his death if he were conscious of a third person’s trying to force him out the window to a certain death. His resistance or, rather, the reaction to quiet his resistance by such third persons might have left its imprint on the skull of Dr. Olson. Our sights were therefore particularly set on that portion of his anatomy.

Yet before we could go further with these examinations, we must needs establish the identification of the remains as that of Frank Olson. It may seem superfluous for us to have labored to identify the remains from the grave, marked by a toe tag as Frank Olson, as those of Frank Olson, but such are the intrinsic necessities of a scientific investigation. The grave marker was presumptive evidence of his identity and burial location, as was the toe tag attached to the remains in the coffin.

We knew that Dr. Olson had been a pipe smoker, which could be reflected in his teeth, that he might have taken some falls from horseback riding, and that he’d been discharged from the army for an ulcer. These could become helpful for the purpose of solidifying the identification. In exhumations, no stone should be left unturned for there will probably be no future opportunity to revisit an exhumation once the remains are reburied.

Jeff Kercheval rolled the mummified palmar surface of the finger pads after having in fused them with a saline solution to puff up the flesh of the finger pads, and I mikrosiled (a “silly putty” type of material) cast them, both with splendid results, in the hope that ante-mortem fingerprints of Frank Olson in his military records might be retrieved for comparison purposes. However, we were not to be blessed by such good fortune, since his fingerprints if they had ever appeared in his military records had been destroyed long ago.

Jack Frost, our pathologist from West Virginia, performed the autopsy. Jack is an active, wiry man, a contemporary of mine, who has more than once tracked the story of an undetermined death to resolve its particular manner. His instincts are superb and his work ethic exacting and conscientious.

In a full autopsy, the external evaluation consists of examining old injuries, along with tattoos and scars. Trace evidence, such as hairs and fibers, is collected off the body and from under the fingernails. Even the nails are clipped or retained in full.

In the standard autopsy, the pathologist makes a ‘Y’ incision, cutting into the body from shoulder to shoulder, with the arms of the “Y” meeting at the sternum (breast plate) and then going straight down the abdomen to the groin. A saw (often a Stryker saw) is used to cut through the ribs so that the ribcage can be lifted away as one piece from the soft internal organs.

The next step is to take a blood sample from the heart for drug and other subsequent tests, and then start taking the organs out, one by one, to examine and to weigh them. If there is fluid in an organ, it gets drained for a sample, and then the stomach and intestines are opened to examine the contents. We were only interested in the condition of the organs of Dr. Olson for the purpose of assaying injuries to them.

Injuries are generally categorized as blunt-force trauma, gunshot, and sharp-force trauma. In all cases, the number of wounds is recorded and each wound is carefully measured and its characteristics described.

A blunt force injury comes from impact with an object, lacking sharp edges, like a gun butt, a hammer or, in this instance, the 7th Avenue sidewalk. A medical examiner will try to determine the direction of impact, the type of object that caused it, and how often contact was made. A suspect weapon may or may not be available, but if it is, then the wound patterns may be connected to the instrumentality causing them, described as a pattern-type injury.

Sometimes lacerations result, which is a tearing injury from impact and has ragged or abraded edges, often with bruising. There may also be abrasions, or friction injuries that remove superficial layers of skin. Contusions are ruptures of small subcutaneous blood vessels. Crushing wounds result from blunt violence to skin which is close to bone, causing these wounds to bleed into the surrounding tissues.

With gunshot wounds, the coroner looks for distinct patterns that indicate the type of weapon used, where the bullet entered and exited (if it did), and how far from the body the gun was when the shot occurred.
With knife or “incised” wounds, the ME must draw a distinction between cut and stab or puncture wounds, and among different types of piercing implements such as an ice pick or a knife.

Some victims are asphyxiated, which results from cutting off oxygen to the brain. Hanging, obstruction of airways with some object, smothering, or strangulation can cause asphyxia and each has specific manifestations. Carbon monoxide poisoning can also be a cause of death.

After examining and describing wounds for the documentary record, the ME takes swabs from all orifices and cuts pieces from the organs to place on slides for further trace evidence, including firearms, toxicological (poisons), histological (cellular) studies. Samples of hair are taken as well, and if the body has recently died, urine is removed from the bladder for drug testing. The scientific studies following the autopsy can take weeks to months. Consequently, we knew those results would likely be a long time coming.

Finally, we examine the head, first examining the eyes and skin for pinpoint capillary hemorrhages (called petechiae) that may reveal evidence of strangulation. After that, we incise the scalp behind the head and carefully reflect the skin over the face to expose the skull. Using a high-speed oscillating saw, we open the skull and remove the calvarium (the top of the skull above the brow ridges) so we can lift out the brain to examine and weigh it and examine the intra-cranial walls of the skull.

All of this, of course, depends on having a well-preserved body, and organs, which we did.

As Dr. Frost systematically worked his way over the body, it was seen through the x-rays that Olson’s right foot had taken the greatest impact upon colliding with the pavement. There was a small laceration in the bottom of the right heel causing a fracture of the calcaneus (the heel bone). The right tibia (lower leg bone) was massively fractured resulting in its being in two linear pieces. On the left side of the body, there was an indication of hitting something hard with the bottom of the foot.

During all these close and careful scientific perambulations, my overriding concentration was with the goings-on in Olson’s room that might have precipitated his fall from it. If Eric Olson’s suspicions of homicide were correct, then it was possible that Frank Olson had been hit with something in the room and then thrown or dropped out the window. The most likely source revealing such a happening was Olson’s head.

Over the left eye, underneath unbroken skin, was a fist-sized hematoma embedded in the sub-galeal sheath. This sub-galeal hematoma necessarily resulted from the hemorrhage of a blood vessel over the left eye. The flesh in that area of the scalp was intact, having experienced, as best we could tell, neither a laceration nor an incised wound. No fracture of the skull or any other hemorrhage could be directly related to the impact causing this hematoma. In a way it seemed to stand apart and alone. It had not been noted in Dr. Di Maio’s first autopsy report.

Yet Jack Frost thought that if Olson had been hit with a blunt force object in the room, he would expect to find some indication on the skull’s surface. He thought what he found was more consistent with the man’s head hitting a broad, flat, firm obstruction—possibly the window frame or the window’s plate glass itself. However, the size of the injury suggested to me that if Olson hit his head against a wall or window frame first, he would have been unconscious when he took another run at the glass. And if he had butted his head against the glass on his way out, breaking it in the doing, then he’d necessarily had his head up and was looking where he was going with his arms at his sides.

While I didn’t find it entirely unlikely that someone would want to see what was about to happen to him, I did think it unlikely that such a suicidally-minded person would have his arms at his sides, as Jack Frost’s opinion suggested, with his head taking the brunt of the collision with the window. It was improbable that Olson’s exit was as Jack Frost hypothesized especially with the shade drawn and the window closed. Not even Superman has been pictured soaring off into the blue in that fashion.

To get a closer analysis of the bones and flesh, we transported the remains an hour north to Dr. Jack Levisky’s anthropology lab at York College in York, Pennsylvania, where more intensive analysis could be conducted under his supervision.

Chair of the behavioral Sciences Department there, Dr. Levisky is a quiet and unassuming scientist with a lively interest in historical cemeteries in the York county arena. Being located close to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where a fierce four-day battle was waged in 1863 that turned the tide of the American Civil War, he is fully apprized of local efforts in historical preservation

.In Dr. Levisky’s laboratory at York College the remains of Dr. Olsen were kept in a secure vault under lock and key while Jack Levisky and his assistant, Sherry Brown, worked to macerate (deflesh) the bones. With the bones defleshed it would be possible to gain closer insights into the fractures and their patterns and interconnectedness than even the x-rays provided to us. As it happened, some hairline fractures, undetected on the radiographs, were discovered only after inspection of the skeletorized remains. The objectives of the project thus required that the bones be defleshed.

Dr. Levisky’s calculations revealed three separate fracture sites: one was in the upper body, particularly the ribs and shoulders where Olson must have collided with a construction barrier at street level; another in the lower legs as they impacted the sidewalk with the forces of velocity having traveled upward to cause a “book” fracture in the pelvis (opening it like the pages of a book); and dissipating the upward thrust so as to protect the vertebral column from any dislodgement; and thirdly, a horizontally aligned fracture to the right temporal and parietal bones of Dr. Olson’s skull, occasioned in all probability when his head hit the sidewalk after his feet had first struck the pavement and he just toppled over. At the point of impact, the skull was split from right to left across the top of the skull allowing it to be manipulated as if it were hinged.

From our anthropological appraisal, we concluded that in his descent, Dr. Olson’s upper body had first struck an obstruction, and we learned later that a wooden barrier had been in place that night, located along the building wall for sandblasting purposes. It was likely he had struck that, spinning his body about so that he landed feet first on the sidewalk in an almost upright posture. Then he fell like a rag doll to his side, coming to a full stop lying supine on the sidewalk.

Yet nothing had been seen thus far to account for the large hematoma to Olson’s head. It remained for us to assess how and where it had come into existence, because we were convinced it would be signally instrumental in resolving the dispute over whether his death was an accident, a suicide or, worse yet, a homicide.

To assist in our evaluation, we excised the skin around the site of the parietal laceration and studied it microscopically. Viewing it under a stereo microscope left no doubt that this laceration was a unit and not the sum of more than one blow at the same site inflicted at different times or places.

Then we looked for trace elements in the excised tissue that might resolve some of the mystery as to how and where it came in to being. A scanning electron microscope, coupled with energy dispersive X-ray, disclosed the presence of a number of elements, one of which was silicon in a rather high concentration. The element silicon, second only to oxygen in its abundance in the earth’s crust, is a principal component of glass. The supposition surfaced that the laceration showed evidence of a fragment of glass of micron size (one thousandth of a millimeter).

Yet even supposing that this trace of silicon demonstrated the presence of glass, the question remained whether it was glass from the window of Room 1018A or from some other source. And if it were determined to be glass from the window of Room 1018A, there remained a question whether it came to adhere in this laceration when Dr. Olson’s head struck the window of Room 1018A in exiting it or whether it was the broken window glass of Room 1018A already lying on the sidewalk of 7th Avenue when Dr. Olson’s head hit there. Of course it bears mention that it could be random broken glass on the sidewalk having no connection to Dr. Olson’s death.

Since the laceration and its subjacent skull fracture plainly seemed to be linked to a single impact, and since that impact would have to have been a blow well beyond the capacity of a window or its housing to inflict, I believed that the glass in that laceration must have originated from a particle of glass picked up at the street level.

But whether that glass was the window glass of room 1018A or some foreign piece of glass of infinitesimally minute size that had been lying about on the 7th Avenue sidewalk of the Hotel Statler are equally possible, and that issue is a conundrum not answerable by scientific means. We can only infer that the laceration had glass in it and that it came from glass from the sidewalk. Further than this we dare not even hazard a guess.

Our next port of call for identification purposes lay in the teeth. Not having ante-mortem dental X-rays of Frank Olson, how were we to make an acceptable identification? Photographs of Olson showing his teeth through a smiling face were assembled and forwarded to the team’s forensic odontologist, Dr. John McDowell, at the University of Colorado Medical School in Denver. At the same time the actual skull from our exhumation was forwarded to Dr. McDowell. His report of his dental comparisons was thorough and constituted additional strong support for the remains being those of Frank Olson, even though it lacked the element of surprise that his dental expertise revealed from the exhumed teeth of Jesse Woodson James.

While we had no reasonable doubt about the identity of these remains, we decided to go one long stride forward with new technology still on the scientific cusp to attempt a computerized superimposition of the skull to known photographs of Frank Olson. Calling upon the combined services of Dr. Vernon Spitzer, also of the University of Colorado in Denver, and Michael Sellbert of Engineering Animation, Inc, we were able to use computer wizardry to see how the ante-mortem photographs of Olson matched the skull from the grave. These telling results left no further doubt that the remains we had autopsied were those of Dr. Frank Olson to the exclusion of anyone else.

A computer animation of the most likely scenarios for Frank Olson’s fall was to follow after additional on scene measurements based on the recollections of those present at the scene on the occasion of Olson’s death-fall.

6

Later in June, 1993 I located and visited with Armand Pastore, the Hotel Statler’s assistant night manager in 1953, who had been summoned to Olson’s side. His recollection of the location of Dr. Olson’s body on the sidewalk fronting the hotel was quite fresh and keen, giving us a base from which to synthesize a computer animation of the event. It also provided a backdrop for our reconstructing the scene at the street level of the hotel. He said that when he found Olson, his eyes were open while he was making a supreme effort to speak, but words were only an incomprehensible gurgle. As he lay on his back one of his legs was twisted at a terrible angle. Before a priest and an ambulance arrived, Olson died in Pastore’s arms.

Pastore then went across the street to look at the upper floors from which Olson had doubtlessly fallen. He espied a window shade sticking out through one of the windows in the upper floors — a window that was broken. Having identified the room as 1018A, he proceeded to check the hotel records and found that two people were staying in that room: Frank Olson and Robert Lashbrook. Upon the arrival of the police Pastore escorted them to the tenth floor. As Pastore placed his pass-key into the door, the police drew their guns as a precautionary measure.

Upon the door being opened by Pastore the room, its window broken, appeared to be empty, aswim in cold air. Lashbrook, the other occupant of the room, was found to be sitting in the bathroom on the toilet with his head in his hands. Lashbrook, giving the impression of being befuddled, said he had been sleeping when he awoke to the sound of crashing glass.

Pastore told me that Lashbrook’s statements and behavior disturbed him and led him to doubt the truth of Lashbrook’s recitals. Why hadn’t he called downstairs to the desk to find out about his friend’s condition? Why had he placed a most curious telephone call only to another C.I.A. operative stating only that “he” was “gone”? And why was he just sitting there many removes from any positive action?

Another peculiar aspect of the incident was the condition of the bed in which Olson supposedly had been asleep. The bedclothes were pulled back in a way that was consistent with someone ripping him out of bed forcibly.

His suspicions aroused, Pastore spoke to the hotel’s phone operator, asking if any calls had come from room 1018A. She recalled one call. The man in the room had called a number out on Long Island while she had listened in. When an unidentified person answered, the caller said, “Well, he’s gone.” At the other end the reply was brief and unemotional. “That’s too bad” he said. They then both had both hung up with nothing more being said. This report did nothing to quiet Pastore’s suspicions.

A later report from the C.I.A., which Eric Olson had brought to my attention, disclosed that the operator had overheard a call from Lashbrook to Dr. Harold Abramson’s clinic on Long Island— Abramson was the man charged with overseeing Olson’s treatment in New York City.

Other suspicious circumstances emerged. Olson was rushed into the autopsy room but then they decided not to do a full autopsy. We also learned that the priest who came to the site for the purpose of giving Dr. Olson the Last Rites was quietly moved aside. So there were many aspects of this case that were very suspicious, and they would become even more so.

While interviewing Pastore he showed us the approximate location of a wooden barrier that had been in place at the time Olson fell. It was on the sidewalk in front of the Penn Bar, adjacent to the place where he had found Dr. Olson’s body. I gained confirmation for some of Pastore’s remembrances from another former Hotel Statler employee, employed, upon my meeting with him, at the relocated Penn Bar.He was on duty at the hotel the night of Olson’s death. It was also his recollection that there was a barrier in front of the Penn Bar during steam cleaning of the building’s street level stone facing.

From what Pastore could recall, I determined that Dr. Olson had landed at a particular location on the sidewalk, and he told us that when he looked up, the drapes and shades from 1018A were flapping in the breeze outside the window. This firsthand information fixed the location of Dr. Olson’s fall and enabled us to reverse his travel for reenactment from that point back to the room. We used that information to assist in a reconstruction.

We had a triad of possibilities to consider: that someone in the room had hit Olson and pushed or dropped him out; that he had hit something on the way out or down; and that he had received his injury on the sidewalk. We would use the injury and the information to make this determination.

Two matters of a bioengineering nature that drew our attention deserve separate mention here. The first relates to the speed at which Dr. Olson exited the window of Room 1018A. The other concerns the physical difficulties to be encountered in falling through a closed window or its housing.

The distance from the sidewalk to the windowsill of Room 1018A was about 173 feet as determined by triangulation made by Geologist George Stephens and myself from actual measurements we made onsite. Using Pastore’s information and our measurements, we had the engineers from Engineering Animation, Inc. create a computer simulation of the fall, figuring in the height in feet to room 1018A with the location of the beds in the room and the floor measurements in room 1013A to determine both the horizontal and vertical velocity of Olson’s exiting the room and falling to the street.

It was calculated that for Dr. Olson to have struck the sidewalk-level wooden barrier causing him to land where Pastore said, his exit velocity would have had to have been no more than 1.5 miles per hour, because a greater speed would have propelled his body beyond striking range of the barrier. Consequently, so he had fallen at about half the speed of a normal walker’s pace, hardly running as if his death depended on it. Yet this estimate of horizontal velocity did not shed light on whether Olson went through an open or closed window, or with or without a drawn shade. Those factors would have an impact on his speed in exiting the room. Would one and one-half miles per hour be sufficient speed for him to exit through a closed window? That remained a lingering and unresolved puzzle.

And still the possibility could not be discounted that someone in the room had inflicted a blow to Dr. Olson in the process of stunning him into submission, preparatory to ejecting him from the window, especially if the window was open at the time and broken thereafter to coincide with Lashbrook’s contemporaneous statements.

The next step in our reconstruction efforts was to assay the size of the room, the location of the beds in the room, the height and dimensions of the window, and any obstructions that might have been in front of it. It was within our engineering objectives to seek an answer to the question of the velocity needed to exit the room, whether the window was open or closed at the time. In addition, we learned that the nature and thickness of the window glass, although altered at the time of our on-scene investigations, was identical to that of a window in an upstairs unit at the hotel.
More importantly, the window in 1018A was unchanged in its dimensions from 1953, and even the current radiator that had fronted the window then was now a similarly sized heating unit in the same position. I also learned upon a visit to the window shade’s manufacturer in Alexandria, Virginia, that the shade, if drawn, would have impeded Dr. Olson’s exit making it implausible that he could have exited with it drawn at the time. All of these factors affected our computerized reconstruction of the incident and augmented the complexities and the imponderables of bringing the truth of Dr. Olson’s death to light.

We know that the horizontal divider on this double-hung window was five feet ten inches from the floor of Room 1018A. We accepted as a fact that Dr. Olson himself was five feet ten inches tall, necessitating his bending over to some degree to clear the horizontal bar of the window. Our measurements also revealed that the lower window ledge was thirty-one inches from the floor, requiring a person bent on throwing himself head first through the window to elevate himself and be airborne to clear the ledge. The combination of these two gymnastic feats leaves it highly problematic that striking the window glass or the window’s housing could realistically be said to have been the cause of the hematoma situated just over and traveling to the orbit of the left eye.

To gain a measure of certainty on this matter, we would have to experiment with a number of five-foot-ten inch bodies (or simulations of them in the form of mannequins) hurtling through a window of the dimensions and the location of the one in Room 1018A. Ruefully, no such experiment could be designed with any approach to verisimilitude. No would-be “A” students in any of my classes in law or forensic science were game to be guinea pigs in such an experiment. The one component that we cannot factor into such an experiment and without which such an experiment would be fatally flawed is the agony of disorientation that one must surmise overpowered Dr. Olson if he went through the window by his own unreasoned choice.

We gave serious consideration to whether the hematoma to Dr. Olson’s skull had occurred at the street level when his body, determined to have been traveling in excess of sixty miles per hour, struck one or more hard and unresisting objects. I discussed this matter with Dr. Batterman, our team’s bioengineer, and he left me with the distinct understanding that if this part of Dr. Olson’s frontal bone had come into direct contact with an object at ground level at any speed above eleven miles per hour the frontal bone would have suffered a fracture, and the skin would have been lacerated. None of that having occurred, that possibility seemed to be excluded. In other words, had the hematoma been caused by hitting the sidewalk, there would have been much more damage to the skull than we found.

Regarding this hematoma, however, we must address another matter. Hemorrhages of the head do occur from trauma inflicted at a site removed from the situs of the hemorrhage. Intra-cranial contrecoup hemorrhaging is a classic example, as is the hemorrhaging of the eye from gunshot wounds to the head, resulting in what is known in the parlance of forensic pathologists as “raccoon’s eye.” A contre-coup injury within the intra-cranial vault occurs when the skull has sustained trauma to one side, say in a fall, but the interior hemorrhaging is massed on the opposite side of the intra-cranial vault. The blow to the head creates a wave effect on the brain tissue, causing it to flow to the side of the skull opposite the injury site where hemorrhaging occurs when the moving brain tissue finds no outlet and crashes against the inner table of the skull. A contra-coup hemorrhage is the consequence.

The specific question, then, was whether the sub-galeal hemorrhage over the left eye can reasonably be attributable to the impact to the right parietal bone, resulting in the hinge fracture of the skull.

I noted that the hematoma over Dr. Olson’s left eye did not bear even the remotest resemblance to a hemorrhage resulting from a contrecoup cephalic insult. It was not even remotely similar, and likewise, Olson’s hemorrhage over the frontal bone had no association with the firearms-injury phenomenon that produces a raccoon’s eye. That is not to say that this hematoma could not have resulted from the force fracturing the right parietal bone, only that more than speculation must be demonstrated to reach that conclusion.

7

I realized full well that the major unresolved mystery continued to be: the large hemorrhage above the left eye. All of the team members agreed that it was most likely that it had occurred as the result of some incident in the room, not from hitting the sidewalk nor in Olson’s descent. The question was, did it happen in the room prior to his going out the window or did it happen at the window when he went out? Given what we knew about Lashbrook’s immediate reaction that night, I thought a straight-forward uncomplicated interpretation was likely to be the correct one. Investigations of suspicious events are justifiably reliant on an Occam’s razor’s approach in reaching their conclusions. When two or more possibilities exist, sometimes even when equally plausible, it is incumbent to adopt that rationale which is the simplest, the most direct and the least convoluted, so Occam’s razor teaches.

Among the few matters on which we can only speculate is the likelihood that the traditional view (at least since 1976) of Dr. Olson’s exiting the window – glass, shade and all – is scientifically and realistically plausible. This is a matter which is just not scientifically testable in view of our not knowing and not being able to reconstruct, if we did know, the state of mind of Dr. Olson as he hurtled head first through the window on his own (or that induced by LSD) misbegotten choice, if such was indeed the case. For myself, I am solidly skeptical of anyone in Dr. Olson’s allegedly distraught state of mind, or even someone of sound mind and memory, clearing a 31-inch high window opening obscured by a drawn shade, all in the darkness of a hotel room at night without having his line of travel so obstructed as to cause the venture to misfire. On this issue, until this query is put to rest by adequate scientific testing, I am a diehard skeptic.

It came time to probe other avenues of possible information on Dr. Olson’s death. Testing for the presence of drugs in the bodily tissues and the hair of Dr. Olson was a first order of our scientific sequelae following the autopsy. But what drugs or their metabolites should we seek to discover?

Self-evidently LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) was at the very top of our list, but other drugs were on it as well. With all the outrage over the C.I.A.’s LSD experimentation, little attention has been paid to the government’s testing of other drugs, many of which also have hallucinogenic affects–some like benztropine, or BZ, ever more potent in even smaller doses than LSD.

After a thorough perusal of the various available Freedom of Information documents of the C.I.A.’s drug experiments, I narrowed the field of candidates for our drug testing to tetrahydrocannabinol (the active ingredient in marijuana), mescaline, morning glory, radioactive LSD, LSD and benztropine. Highlighting these drugs or drug sources, I personally delivered a variety of well-preserved, carefully logged and continuously refrigerated bodily tissues harvested by Dr. Frost to Dr. Yale Caplan, one of our forensic toxicologists who had established a private, commercial toxicology lab in Baltimore. Hairs from a number of bodily locations on Dr. Olson, some fitted with a root structure, were also submitted to Dr. Caplan.

His written report came back to me in two parts, with the LSD testing considered separately from other therapeutic or abused substances. The testing of bodily tissues for substances other than LSD was negative. The LSD testing of these tissues through radio-immunoassays (RIA) was deemed inconclusive. I telephoned Dr. Bruce Goldberger, Dr. Caplan’s associate and the man from whose testing these results were derived. From him I learned that the RIA tests had all given positive results for the presence of LSD in the tissues. However, he added, these results were so unusually uniform as to be considered unreliable. Something about the RIA kits was deemed to be plainly out of whack.

Dr. Goldberger, a toxicologist with the University of Florida and an internationally recognized toxicologist, recommended further confirmatory testing at the one location that possessed the knowledge and the technique sufficient to give a firm determination. However, this added testing would cost a minimum of $2000. I knew that if the Olson sons had only a vendetta against the C.I.A., the report of inconclusive results which we had in hand would add a dollop of scientific certainty to their anger leaving them disinclined to go further with drug testing, but much to their credit they agreed to fund the new testing. This proved their stated interest in getting to the root cause of their father’s death, whether the findings implicated the C.I.A. or not in something more nefarious than an accidental death.

On my instruction, Dr. Goldberger forwarded selected bodily tissue samples to Dr. Rodger Foltz at Northwest Toxicology in Salt Lake City, Utah. Dr Foltz is an eminent toxicologist well versed in the use of gas chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry to assay the presence of LSD in bodily tissues. His report confirmed the absence of any traces of LSD in the submitted samples. Happily the extraction process had hit no snags. The detection limits set by Dr. Foltz for his analysis were so low that it can be said with no hint of uncertainty that those tissues were, at the time of testing, devoid of any evidence of LSD.

Having said as much, however, is most definitely, not an affirmation of the lack of LSD in those tissues at the time of Dr. Olson’s death in 1953, or prior to it. The dosage of LSD concededly administered to Dr. Olson was so miniscule—70 micrograms, according to CIA project director Dr. Sidney Gottlieb; the half-life of LSD is so short (only a few hours at the outside), and the liability of LSD in embalmed tissues over time is so unknown that not finding LSD is absolutely non-probative on the issue of whether Dr. Olson had ingested the substance in 1953.

8

At every turning this investigation brought new issues to light to burden and perplex us. One of these perturbing matters was the question of Dr. Olson’s mental stability prior to the Deep Creek experiment on November 19, 1953. According to an undated statement made by Lt. Col. Vincent Ruwet, Olson’s supervisor at then Camp Detrick, “during the period prior to the experiment my opinion of his state of mind was that I noticed nothing which would lead me to believe that he was of unsound mind.” This assessment was said by Colonel Ruwet to be founded on professional opinions and C.I.A. contacts with Dr. Olson and his family, which he described as “intimate” over a two and a half year period prior to Dr. Olson’s death.

Similarly Dr. John Schwab, another of Dr. Olson’s supervisors at Camp Detrick, gave a statement from the perspective of one who knew Dr. Olson both over a long period of time and at home and in the office, that “(h)is general state of mind and outlook on life was always that of extreme optimism. Never was there any indication of pessimism.”

On the contrary Lyman Kirkpatrick would report on December 1, 1953 that in a conversation with Dr. Willis Gibbons, a higher-up in the C.I.A., Gibbons indicated that, “Olson had a history of mental disturbances.” His source for this knowledge was not revealed.

In piecing out the puzzle of the reasons for Dr. Olson’s death, the state of his mental health prior to and at the time of his surreptitiously being given LSD is of prime importance. Mental health professionals recognize that in certain persons suffering from mental distress the ingestion of LSD can have consequences that are reflected in altered personality traits and behavior. Yet the weight of the evidence from friends, the family and professional colleagues of Dr. Olson is that he was outgoing, even extroverted, a family man devoted to his children and in all respects a well-balanced individual prior to the night of November 19, 1953 at Deep Creek. But Dr. Gibbons and the C.I.A. in questionable apologies following Olson’s death would have us believe otherwise.

A well-documented effect of LSD use in some persons is the occurrence of flashbacks, days and even months after the LSD has been taken. However the voluminous literature on the hallucinogenic effects of LSD, compiled from a time before that of Dr. Timothy Leary, the LSD guru of his time, to the present, demonstrates well-nigh conclusively that during flashbacks LSD users do not commit violent acts such as throwing themselves through a closed window. Even a Government study commissioned on account of Dr. Olson’s death and published by the Government Printing Office makes a telling point – a point not in any degree compromised by more recent experience – that LSD flashbacks are a rarity and that during such flashbacks violence is all but non-existent.

Of course violent, and even self-destructive, acts are not uncommon in the immediate aftermath of LSD use, while “tripping,” as it is colloquially said. The death of Diane Linkletter, daughter of celebrity Art Linkletter, reportedly occurred while she was in the grip of LSD and not during a flashback—although it is difficult to say which is which in the case of an LSD habitué.

Is it possible, then, that in the early morning hours of Saturday, November 28, 1953, in Room 1018A of the Hotel Statler in New York City that Frank Olson’s body and mind were so possessed by a dose of LSD that he was given that night which precipitated his exiting the 13th floor window to his death? That possibility is not as fantastical as it might at first blush appear to be.

More searching and additional questing lay before me.

9

According to Colonel Ruwert’s further recollections in 1953 he journeyed to New York City with Dr. Olson on the Tuesday prior to Olson’s death for an emergency visit to Dr. Harold Abramson, a medical doctor who had a grant-in-aid from a C.I.A. cover organization to engage in LSD experimentation, using it as an adjunct to psychotherapy on “abnormal” or mentally disturbed persons. According to Ruwet, Abramson prescribed the use of “sedatives” and a “high-ball” to relieve Olson’s mental distress. Later in the evening of that same Tuesday, Abramson visited Olson’s hotel room and “brought a bottle of bourbon and some Nembutal for Dr. Olson. After “a couple of high-balls,” Abramson left, recommending “to Dr. Olson that he should take a Nembutal which he did at the time and that Dr. Olson take another should he have difficulty sleeping.”

Medicating Dr. Olson with two interacting central nervous system depressants had the real potential of killing him, as columnist Dorothy Kilgallen learned to her fatal distress. What sort of medical practitioner would prescribe with such reckless abandon?

We know that Dr. Harold Abramson was a true believer, in the Eric Hoffer sense, in the value of LSD in psychotherapy for disturbed persons. The literature of his writing on that theme is bountiful, even up to 1975, when the use of LSD had been long prohibited by Federal criminal statutes. It is known also that in 1953, he was under contract with the C.I.A. to experiment with LSD on his mental patients.

Although Dr. Abramson is now deceased, it appeared from the C.I.A. files still available, that his associate Dr. Margaret Ferguson was still alive in 1993. However, my assistant’s phone call to her was abruptly terminated by her. When it was mentioned that the call related to the death of Dr. Olson, she was unwilling to discuss the matter of Dr. Abramson’s treatment of Dr. Olson’s or his experiments with LSD or her knowledge or involvement in it.

The extant record of Dr. Abramson’s commitment to LSD in psychotherapy and his ministrations to Dr. Olson trembles with the disquieting possibility that Dr. Abramson might have given Dr. Olson an additional dose of LSD, under a misguided belief that it would relieve his symptoms of depression. That dose might have catapulted him to his death.

For myself, however, the likelihood of Dr. Abramson’s direct involvement in the death of Dr. Olson is less plausible than that it was the outcome of the C.I.A.’s own calculated misdeeds. Not only does the paper record do more than whisper of this possibility, but the statements and silence of persons privy to insider information on the matter who were interviewed or sought to be interviewed by me reinforce that conviction.

I am fully cognizant of the dread scourge of non-involvement that causes many people to play the clam when information is sought. I am also aware that there are those who refuse to speak because they view the subject under inquiry as too well rung to have any value in pursuing yet another time. Notwithstanding these purported justifications for silence, there are those whose intimate knowledge of critical details imposes upon them a singular duty to speak. Thus, their refusal can legitimately be read as evidence of concealment, and conceivably, even more incriminating mirrorings.

Dr. Margaret Ferguson was not the only one who refused to be interviewed. Vincent Ruwet, both a supervisor of Olson and his supposed friend, also adamantly refused to enter into a dialogue on the death of Dr. Olson. His reiterated one-liner to me during my telephone call was “I have nothing to say on the matter.”

Yet I did find people who would talk, though there were major frustrations in the doing.

10

Retired New York City Patrolman Joseph Guastafeste (meaning a “good feast,” as he told me while preening himself, but the correct translation would be “wasted or ruined feast”) took a different tack and talked a blue streak, but his uncommunicativeness on Dr. Olson’s death was just as indefatigable as that of Colonel Ruwet. He authored the first police report on the death of Dr. Olson and, therefore, presumptively, was the first police officer on the beat to respond to the alarm of a man’s having fallen. My letter to the New York City police department’s pension division seeking to contact him was forwarded to him but I received no reply from him.

However, I was not to be deterred or flummoxed by this administrative impenetrability. My unflagging investigator, Gary Eldredge, located Guastafeste through driver’s license and vehicle registrations as having homes both in New York and in Florida. While attending a scientific convention in Orland, Florida, I decided to rent a car and pay a surprise visit to the former patrolman at his west coast Florida retreat. As it turned out my knock at his door went unanswered. The neighbors, however, said Gustafeste was only momentarily absent. So I hid out at a nearby Hooter’s, courtesy of a CBS camera crew, who were following me about.

Upon my returning to Gustafeste’s home in the darkness I noted a light was on in the dimly lighted interior. I was beginning to sense that I was approaching a fog-laden back alley in a London byway.

With a mike concealed in my pocket connected to the CBS camera crew across the street, I knocked imploringly on Gustafeste’s door. “Who’s there?” came a gruff and uninviting male voice. “A professor investigating the death of Dr. Frank Olson,” I gently responded. Suddenly a female voice interjected “I knew they’d find you some day. Don’t let him in.”

That voice having had its strongly voiced say the door was opened and Joseph Gustafeste stepped out on the porch having turned on a bare bulb over my head. As the curtains fluttered on a window next to the front door, Gustafeste shut the door and turned his imposing full seventy year old frame toward me. “What do you want?” he said with emphasis on each word. “Your remembrances of Dr. Olson’s death in a fall from the Hotel Statler in November 1953 is what brings me to you,” I answered in an unquavering voice.

Guastafeste professed to remember little of the events at the time of his investigation into Olson’s death. He did confirm night manager Armond Pastore’s statement that Olson was still breathing as he lay on the sidewalk. On matters of more vital moment, such as what Lashbrook’s statement or behavior might have been when confronted in room 1018A, his memory went blank and immovably so. As he explained it to me, he was just a “dumb cop.”

I cannot comment on that, except to say that his memory was obviously very selective, sometimes showing crystal clarity and sometimes mired in opacity. His failure to recall whether he kept a record of the event in his patrolman’s notebook was a challenge to his credibility as was his memory lapse on whether this was the one and only jumper he had investigated. Inexplicable silence during an interview comes in many tones and hues. A failure to recall is but one dubious kind.

Dr. Robert Lashbrook was to be next in my investigative sights. No devious or long-term tracking was necessitated in this instance. One telephone call said it all. And that all was a most disturbing revelation.

Many persons with insider information whom I contacted were more or less generous with their time. Dr. Lashbrook, then retired from the C.I.A., permitted a member of my team to question him at some length over the telephone. The most important new and unexpected revelation from Lashbrook was his contradicting all the previous reports of what had caused him to awaken when Olson plummeted to his death.

It was not as the Church Committee and the New York City Police Report and all the many other reports, including his own signed report, had said that “a crash of glass” had cast his sleep aside. It was rather the noise of the window shade spinning in its upper housing. As to whether the glass had been broken at all, he asserted he had no recollection, even though the New York City Police report had simply repeated his own recitals that he had heard “a crash of glass” and he admitted to having gone to the window, put his head outside it, and viewed the body of what he surmised was Dr. Olson on the sidewalk below. In addition his signed statement to the C.I.A. on December 7, 1953 speaks of Olson having exited through a closed window. Moreover Lashbrook’s remembrance of the window-shade’s snapping back into its housing was out of joint with Armond Pastore’s oft-repeated recollection of the shade’s having been pushed through the window’s broken glass.

Moreover my prior interview with Lyman Kirkpatrick, a long-time manufacturer of window shades, left me with little doubt that a shade of the type fitted to the window of room 1018A would not snap back to its housing if a body had struck it full-tilt.

Was Lashbrook’s memory playing tricks on him, or was he playing hob with the truth of the matter? Clearly his statements must be considered to be the most self-serving of all, since he was the last person known to have seen Dr. Olson before he plunged to his death and it was he who was charged with supervising Olson’s well-being.

I had yet one more interview to pursue, and that was with Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the man reported to have been instrumental in the death of Patrice Lumumba in South Africa. It turned out to be the most mind-bending of all the interviews I had conducted in this investigation.

My meeting with him took place in his home near Culpepper, Virginia, early on a Sunday morning as the sun was peeking over the eastern horizon. Hearing of this impending interview Eric Olson had cautioned me, a genuine smile creasing his face, not to “drink his coffee.” I did and lived to drink more on another day.
I had almost been foiled in this opportunity by my initial attempt to engage him in conversation unannounced with CBS cameramen in the background. That encounter came to naught because of his distress over the presence of the media. However on his initiative in telephoning me at my office, a later meeting was scheduled at which he demanded the right to question me for one hour in return for my interviewing him for an equal period of time. A most uncommon request, but one to which I acceded. His stipulations made me make haste to sit in his presence, the presence, as it appeared, of a most curious man with a puzzling mind.

Even though I had my tape recorder in my pocket at our meeting, I judged it best not to seek my interviewee’s permission to turn it on remitting myself to four pages of handwritten notes and a contemporaneous transcription of them into my tape recorder as I motored home after our meeting.

My over-all assessment of this interview was not at all favorable to Dr. Gottlieb. His undue concern over my investigation and its findings evidenced more than idle curiosity. His reaction to the glare of the rising sun’s blinding me like an interrogation lamp causing me to seek to move to another chair out of the sun’s bright light had C.I.A. written all over it. Instead of my moving to another chair at the table he politely insisted that I relocate the same chair upon which I had been sitting up to then. Query: was the chair “bugged” or was my Robert Redford movie viewers idea of the C.I.A. verging on paranoia? His explanations for his actions both before and after Olson’s death were at least unsatisfactory and at most incredible.

For example, when I asked whether any of the eight unwitting participants in the LSD experiment had been pre-screened for any medical disabilities that might put them at risk, he unhesitatingly said, “No.” When I inquired whether any medical personnel had been in attendance at the Deep Creek meeting in the eventuality that some one of the LSD subjects would have an untoward reaction requiring immediate medical attention, he again replied, “No.” Yet his own prior use of LSD, which he openly admitted, had not been so devoid of medical supervision.

Other questions gave rise to answers sufficient to stand plausibility on its head. Had he shredded documents relevant to this matter? “Sure” was his immediate reply.

“But why,” I rejoined?

So that those documents would not be “misunderstood,” he answered.

Misunderstood? Or was it rather necessary to destroy them so that they would not be understood, I silently mused?

When I asked what action he had first taken upon being apprised by Lashbrook of Olson’s death, he said he called his boss, Dr. Gibbons, to arrange a meeting at 5 A.M. that very morning. In reply to my raised eyebrows and my inquiry as to the purpose for such a meeting with such urgency, he said the meeting was designed to be “informational.”

As he spoke my mind raced with a stream of unvoiced questions. Informational, and not to plot to cover the tracks of persons responsible for Dr. Olson’s death? If informational only, why the rush to have an immediate meeting? If not a deliberate effort to present a united front in the event of a skeptical and official inquiry, why not wait until regular business hours for the “informational” meeting?

Probably the most unsettling, even unnerving moment in my conversation with Dr. Gottlieb occurred toward its close when he spontaneously sought to enlighten me on a matter of which I might not take due notice—so he thought. He pointedly explained that in 1953 the Russian menace was quite palpable and that it was potentially worsened by the Russians’ having cached many kilograms of LSD from the Sandoz laboratory in Switzerland.

Listening awe-struck to him as I gazed at a picture of South African Bishop Tutu on the wall, I was emboldened to ask “how he could so recklessly and cavalierly have jeopardized the lives of so many of his own men by the Deep Creek Lodge experiment with LSD.”

“Professor,” he said without mincing a word, “you just do not understand. I had the security of this country in my hands.” He did not say more, nor need he have done so nor did I, dumb-founded, offer a rejoinder. The means-end message was pellucidly clear. Risking the lives of the unwitting victims of the Deep Creek experiment was simply the necessary means to a greater good, the protection of the national security.

And that was my final interview in this deeply disturbing investigation. I realized then that my professional ivory-tower had not equipped me for the C.I.A.’s world of feints, flaws and foibles.

11

The original plan was to rebury Frank Olson at Mount Olivet Cemetery beside his wife, Alice, in July 1994, but instead his remains were stored for possible re-examination. The bones lay in pieces in boxes under lock and key in my office at GW, and the soft flesh was placed in a vault in storage at York College. These are the places where Olson’s remains were deposited for eight years while Eric pursued further avenues of investigation. Not even the presentation of my team’s scientific and investigative findings at the National Press Club on November 28, 1994, closed the door to the emergence of new eye-opening details. It was the day following the National Press Club’s public disclosure of our work and findings that I received a telephone call from Dr. Robert Gibson, a retired psychiatrist, who indicated that his memory had been jogged by his reading the newspaper accounts of my Olson labors.

Dr. Gibson informed me that he had been the psychiatrist on duty at the Chestnut Lodge hospital in Rockville, Maryland when Lashbrook, without identifying himself, had called from New York City just hours before Dr. Olson died. He told me he could never forget that call although so many years had passed because he was also the recipient of a second phone call the next morning from Dr. Lashbrook stating that Dr. Olson had died in New York City and, therefore, he would not be coming to Chestnut Lodge Hospital.

Dr. Gibson explained that the affair was still vivid in his memory because he grieved over the fact that he had dissuaded Dr. Lashbrook from journeying with Dr. Olson to the hospital on the night of the first phone call. His recommendations against hospitalization had been voiced when Dr. Lashbrook had insisted that Olson was then no danger to himself or to others.

Upon my inquiring about the conversation between him and Dr. Lashbrook on the morning of Olson’s death, I was stunned to hear yet another conflicting account from Lashbrook of the occurrence. Dr. Gibson affirmed that Lashbrook had said he awakened to find Olson standing in the middle of the hotel room. He had tried to speak to Olson, but Olson had run straight toward the window, through it and to his death. But Lashbrook had not said a word about whether the window was closed, whether the shade was drawn or otherwise. However, I now had another conflicting view of the last moments in the life of Frank Olson. And this latest account came from the recollections of an unimpeachable reporter, a psychiatrist of impeccable credentials who had gone on to become the director of the esteemed Sheppard, Enoch and Pratt Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. This telephone call was memorialized by me in a subsequent taped interview with Dr. Gibson at the Sheppard, Enoch and Pratt Hospital.

That same year, Eric and Nils retained attorney Harry Huge, based in Washington, D.C., to represent them in their effort to re-open the case and instigate a criminal investigation. They had high hopes of suing the government for misrepresentation or concealment of the facts. Huge drafted a fifteen-page memorandum in support of their position. That memorandum, together with the urging of others, persuaded New York’s District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau, to re-open the investigation. He assigned the case to Stephen Saracco and Daniel Bibb, seasoned prosecutors on the “cold cases” unit. They immediately began to run down leads, and were surprised to learn that the C.I.A. had not turned over to my team Olson’s fingerprints or dental records. They also noted my interview with Gottlieb and my unshakeable feeling that he was concealing information.

In addition, it was at least odd that C.I.A. Director William Colby had produced documents about Olson’s projects that Gottlieb had testified before Congress in 1977 were destroyed. At that time he had asked for immunity, but Saracco was not sure why he would do so, nor why so much material had been redacted from the Olson files. They looked more closely at several aides-de-memoirs that the Olson’s had not accessed believing they held the key to why Frank Olson had been considered a security hazard.One of these memos indicated that Olson had been associated with what it dubbed “un-American” groups. The message was cryptic, but it characterized Frank Olson as having “no inhibitions.”

Saracco and Bibb decided to interview William Colby, Vincent Ruwet, Robert Lashbrook, and Sidney Gottlieb. They mailed letters to Ruwet and Colby. Within days, Colby suddenly turned up missing. He left a computer running in his home, a glass of wine on the table, and the lights and radio on. It was a mystery, solved a week later when searchers found his decomposing remains on a Chesapeake Bay island. His death was ruled an accidental drowning when water swamped his canoe.

Saracco and Bibb did manage to meet with Ruwet in Frederick, Maryland, as reported by H.P. Albarelli, and they found him skillfully evasive. They decided to set up a second meeting to explore further what he had said, but on November 16, Vincent Ruwet suffered a fatal heart attack.

Lashbrook, now 80, refused to respond to the request for an interview, so the DA’s office issued a subpoena. Lashbrook refused it. Saracco and Bibb flew to meet him in California, but he would only talk in the presence of an attorney, which resulted in his stone walling all the questions asked.

Gottlieb was another matter. Even as they were seeking an interview, they learned that he was being sued in civil court by the family of an aspiring artist whom he had allegedly drugged with LSD in Paris in 1952. The incident had made this man unstable and had ruined his life, so it was alleged, possibly precipitating his early death. The situation was consistent with the CIA’s surreptitious drugging of hundreds of unwitting American citizens as part of their Cold War experiments. At Senate hearings on the matter in 1977, Gottlieb had stated that these were risks worth taking for the sake of national security, the same position he had expressed to me at our one and only meeting.

With this information in hand, Saracco and Bibb prepared to see him. He had told reporters in the past that he was not going to discuss Frank Olson any further. Nevertheless, the attorneys prepared a draft of a letter to him. On that same day, Gottlieb died from a heart attack.

A bit befuddled and bemused, the prosecutors turned their attention to David Berlin, who had investigated the C.I.A. in 1975 and had brought Frank Olson’s LSD dosing to public attention. They wanted to know the wherewithal of those details. Prophetically enough, before they could make contact with him, Berlin fell in a hotel room and died from head injuries.

Eric Olson, always on the qui vive for new information, discovered that in the assassination training unit of the Israeli Mossad, the Olson case was used as an example of the perfect murder. Eventually investigative essayist H.P. Albarelli came to Olson in his research into the case. He had contacts among C.I.A. agents in Florida, he said, and some of them had told him they knew who had killed Frank Olson in Room 1018A that night. It was his belief that the perpetrators were contract killers associated with a mob family and the C.I.A. had hired them to do their dirty work. However, these agents refused to spill the details without the C.I.A.’s releasing them from their confidentiality agreements, and that never happened.

Then in 1997, Eric obtained a copy of the C.I.A.’s 1953 assassination manual, now declassified. In it, the scenario promoted for “contrived accident” murder precisely fit like the key that would unlock the door the mystery of Frank Olson is death — so much so that the only question remaining was whether his murder was the paradigm for the manual or whether the manual offered the blueprint for his death. That manual clearly suggested disguising a murder as a suicide by dropping the subject from a high window or roof. It also suggested that the perpetrator then play the “horrified witness,” and that drugs be used for the subject’s preparation. If the subject had to be controlled, blows to the temple or behind the ear were said to be effective means of silencing him.

That manual certainly might explain why the C.I.A. had taken an allegedly psychotic man to a hotel room situated on a high floor rather than to a safe house or hospital. It would also explain the low exit velocity that allowed Olson to hit the wooden impediment on the sidewalk below. That is exactly what would have transpired if he had been dropped rather than propelled through the window.

Through an unnamed source, the DA’s office learned that at the Deep Creek meeting, Olson had been given LSD mixed with Meretran, a drug that made people talk more freely. This confirmed the document from Dr. Abramson, written a few weeks after Olson’s death, that the drug had been used to set a trap. He had also told Army researchers that Olson’s death had been in the wake of security breaches by him following his 1953 trip overseas, and that only two people knew the complete story about it. One of them had received a substantial sum of money in the month of Olson’s death for “services rendered.” So had Abramson.

It was learned that an agent who had gone to New York immediately after Olson’s death had listened to a conversation between Lashbrook and Abramson that clearly concerned their conspiring to devise a report to the effect that Olson’s mental state had been deteriorating. But that was not all. Even more frightful discoveries were aborning.

The Olsons discovered documents in Michigan’s Gerald Ford Library that indicated that the government had been extremely concerned upon learning that Frank Olson’s family was questioning the official explanation of his death. The government feared that highly classified information was at stake and that a court might grant full discovery, including information on the nature of Olson’s work. That had to be avoided at any cost. As Eric Olson surmised, “In the wake of the Nuremburg trials in the late 1940s, the United States could not afford to be exposed as a sponsor of the sort of research it had prosecuted the Nazis for undertaking.”

While these myriad investigations were occurring around me, I was not quiescent. At the urging of Eric and Harry Huge I took a train to New York City accompanied by Olson’s boxed skull. Traveling with human skeletal remains in tow always leaves me, as Albert Camus said on another subject, “strangely aching.” I cannot leave the skull out of sight but at the same time I cannot treat it in away to generate suspicions. After all, what would the prying eyes say to my explanation that I was carrying it to the New York City Medical Examiner for his inspection.

Upon arriving in New York City I had my usual professional difficulty of finding my way successfully from Point A, Grand Central Station, to Point B, the District Attorney office where I was to meet a member of the Medical Examiner’s staff. Finding myself lost in the warrens of lower Manhattan I happened by chance upon a police station where I asked for directions. The directions were forthcoming and very accommodating, even to the point of a uniformed officer’s volunteering to show me the way even to the extent of carrying the box with the skull for me. The police officer was most courteous and pointed to my being somewhat over burdened, as he said, for a man of my years with the items I was lugging about with me. Needless to say I declined his offer, not wanting to be exposed as a possible follower of Milwaukee’s cannibalistic killer Jeffrey Dahmer who collected the skulls of his victims.

I made my way unescorted to the District Attorney’s office, where by happenstance I met Patricia Cornwall who said she was there researching material for a book. “What brought you here?” she asked.

“Oh,” I said, “just a skull session with an assistant medical examiner.”

She inquired no further nor did I volunteer anything more.

My meeting with the assistant medical examiner was most unsatisfactory. He entered the meeting with a negative frame of mind, wondering aloud why such a “cold case” would be deserving of his or anyone’s attention. It was, therefore, not unexpected that he would down-play the significance of the sizeable blood stain on the skull over Olson’s left eye. As he put it, the staining could have come about post-mortem. When I asked for his experiential evidence that such a thing had happened in some reported case or cases involving an exhumation many years after the fact, the answer was one that no true scientist would tender. “Everyone knows that to be the case,” he said. I could have asked, but, getting the drift of the position he had taken, I pretermitted asking whether he was telling me that bleeding continued after death even for thirty-six years after the fact.

Here was a pathologist who wanted a smoking gun, not a skull with a massively blood-stained frontal bone, to induce him to declare the manner of death a homicide. I wondered, to myself, with that attitude controlling his decision-making, how many murderers had escaped their just deserts in New York City on his watch.

Foiled and frustrated I made a quick but courteous departure and in my abstracted frame of mind took a taxi back to Grand Central Station.

Early in 2001, Harry Huge reportedly expected the DA’s office to declare Olson’s death a murder, which would free the Olsons to file a substantial lawsuit. However, things began to crumble and by the end of the year, Eric discerned that the DA’s office had retrenched on their efforts. Notwithstanding, the DA’s men had learned that two men had gone into Olson’s room the night of his death. Unfortunately, these men were untraceable at this late date. The C.I.A. denied any knowledge of them, but one man appeared to be related to several assassination cases, and therefore no one was going to talk.

I had thought all along of the possibility of the presence of a third person in room 1018A when Olson exited it. Such a third person could have been positioned to enter from the room next door through a door from that room to room 1018A. The hotel management had refused my request to disclose the identity of any person resident on November 27, 1953 in the adjoining room. It was said not to be the hotel’s policy to reveal the names of its guests since they might be temporarily resident there, shall we say, under circumstances possibly compromising their marital vows or otherwise.

More was yet in the offing.

In the spring of 2001, Norman Cournoyer, who had been a close friend of Olson’s and a colleague at Detrick, contacted the Olson brothers. He had seen the published accounts of the investigations and believed that something was missing. He pointed out that Olson had witnessed harsh interrogations of former Nazis and Soviet spies, and that sometimes these persons had died as a result of those procedures. Olson had heard it said that, despite official denials, the American government had used biological weapons in Korea during the Korean “Conflict.” Alice Olson had said that Frank, her husband, had expressed distress over this possibility, but she had not known if he actually knew anything.

On September 12, 2001, Harry Huge suddenly bowed out. He was swamped with too many other cases, he said. Disappointed, Eric found it difficult acquiring another attorney to take the lead. He decided the time had come to close the case and to rebury his father. He called me in mid-July 2002 to obtain the return of his father’s remains. After eight years of his presence in my office I parted with them with mixed emotions.

On the day before the funeral, Eric and his family held a press conference to call finis to everything he had learned to anyone who was interested. The Olson family had written a twenty-three-page statement for the media, reminding everyone that it had been forty-one years since their father’s death, twenty-seven years since the government had offered what they said was the truth, and eight years since the exhumation.

It was their belief, although they had no smoking gun, that their father had been murdered to keep him from disclosing information about a secret C.I.A. program, and that the story of a “bad trip” on LSD had been concocted either as a cover-up for his murder or as a cloak that concealed the dagger they had figuratively used to kill him.

On August 9, 2002, I went in the company of team members Jack Frost and Jack Levisky to Mount Olivet Cemetery on Market Street in Frederick, Maryland, for Dr. Olson’s reburial beside his wife Alice. It had been eight years since we had exhumed his remains and more than time had passed since that time. Nils and Eric had discussed with me the possibility of cremating the remains of their father. I prevailed on them not to do so for the sake of Alice, their mother, and for the solace they would take in knowing the investigation was not ended, only interrupted by the reburial.

In Mount Olivet Cemetery, which dates its first interment to 1854, lay hundreds of soldiers from both sides of the Civil War, as well as veterans from the past century’s world wars. Eight miles of paved roads run past more than 34,000 graves. Also the impressive monument to Francis Scott Key, who wrote “The Star Spangled Banner,” stood tall and erect there.

At the funeral, attended by several dozen relatives, friends of the family, and members of my team, the remains were lowered into the ground for what could be their final rest.

From my view and that of the clear majority of my team members, with all the other investigative details, as well as what we found scientifically, Dr. Olson’s death was not a suicide. The probabilities, taken together, strongly and relentlessly suggest that it was a homicide.

In the present state of our factual knowledge about the death of Dr. Olson, I would venture to say that the sub-galeal hematoma is singular evidence of the possibility that Dr. Olson was struck a stunning blow to the head by some person or instrument prior to his exiting through the window of Room 1018A, a person or persons with a homicidal frame of mind The convergence of this physical evidence from our scientific investigations with the results of our non-scientific inquiries raises this possibility from the merely possible to the realm of real and incontestable probability.

The documentary evidence from 1953 demonstrates a concerted pattern of concealment and deception on the part of those persons and agencies most closely associated with–and most likely to be accountable for–a homicide most foul in the death of Dr. Olson. And the steeled reluctance to be honest, forthright and candid by persons with knowledge of the occurrence on matters pivotal to the question of homicide or suicide bespeaks an involvement more sinister than mere unconcern, arrogance or even negligence. The confluence of scientific fact and investigative fact points unerringly to the death of Frank Olson as being a homicide, deft, deliberate and diabolical.

CLOSE

A father lost

Since 1953, Eric Olson has heard more than one explanation for his father’s mysterious death. Now he believes it was murder.

He was 9 years old when his mother woke him before dawn half a century ago in Cold War America. Eric Olson came blinking into the living room of their Frederick home, where his father’s boss and friend, Col. Vincent Ruwet, sat with the family doctor.

“Everybody had this stony-faced expression,” Olson recalls. “I remember Ruwet saying, ‘Your father was in New York and he had an accident. He either fell out the window or jumped.'”

After decades of dogged inquiry, Eric Olson now has a new verb for what happened to his father, Frank Olson, who worked for the Army’s top-secret Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, where he developed bioweapons and experimented with mind-control drugs.

Eric Olson found the verb in a 1950s CIA manual that was declassified in 1997 – one more clue in a quest that has consumed his adult life.

The verb is “dropped.” And the manual is a how-to guide for assassins.

“The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface,” the manual says, adding helpfully: “It will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him.”

Eric Olson believes his father – who developed misgivings about his work and tried to resign – was murdered by government agents to protect dark government secrets.

To find out what happened in the Statler Hotel on the night of Nov. 28, 1953, Eric once spent a sleepless night in the room from which his father fell. He confronted his father’s close-mouthed colleagues. He had his father’s mummified body exhumed. And he built a circumstantial case that Frank Olson was the victim of what he calls a “national security homicide.”

The government has long denied the charge of murder. But it has admitted what might be called negligent manslaughter. Its version: that Frank Olson crashed through the window in a suicidal depression nine days after he was given LSD without his knowledge in a CIA mind-control experiment.

Eric never bought that argument. His devotion to the case derailed a promising career as a clinical psychologist that began with a doctorate from Harvard. In some Frederick circles, you’ll hear disapproving murmurs about Eric’s obsession – contrasted with the success of his younger brother, Nils, a dentist. But Nils Olson, 55, says he admires his brother’s tenacity and agrees with his conclusion.

“At every point there seems to be a convergence of the evidence,” Nils Olson says. “It all points to my father’s being murdered.”

The patriotic community surrounding Fort Detrick has long been reluctant to believe such a possibility. Once, Eric Olson says, he was, too.

“I’m not essentially conspiratorial in my worldview,” says the lanky psychologist, who seems almost boyish at 59. “In my father’s case, I just started turning over stones, and there was a snake under every one.”

It may well be that Olson is wrong – that the government merely drugged his father with LSD, treated him thoughtlessly when he fell into madness and covered it up for 22 years. But if Frank Olson was murdered, then part of the plan would naturally be a cover-up.

“No assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded,” says the CIA assassination manual. “Decision and instructions should be confined to an absolute minimum of persons.”

It adds: “For secret assassination … the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated.”

Whether the truth is homicide or suicide induced by a reckless drug experiment, the Olson saga is a cautionary tale in an era that echoes the early days of the Cold War. In the war on terror, America again appears tempted to use extreme measures.

In Olson’s case, it took the government until 1975 to admit to the LSD experiment. When an investigation of CIA abuses exposed the facts in 1975, two White House aides named Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld helped set up a meeting at which President Gerald Ford apologized to the Olson family.

The goal, according to a declassified White House memo, was to avert a lawsuit in which it “may become apparent that we are concealing evidence for national security reasons.”

What evidence was concealed, the memo does not reveal. But people who are far from wild-eyed conspiracy theorists accept the plausibility of Frank Olson’s death as an execution.

Among them is Army intelligence veteran Norman G. Cournoyer, 85, who worked with Olson at Detrick and became one of his closest friends.

“If the question is, did Frank commit suicide, my answer is absolutely, positively not,” says Cournoyer, now frail and wheelchair-bound, living in Amherst, Mass.
Why would he have been killed?

“To shut him up,” Cournoyer says. “Frank was a talker … . His concept of being a real American had changed. He wasn’t sure we should be in germ warfare, at the end.”

William P. Walter, 78, who supervised anthrax production at Detrick, says Olson’s colleagues were divided about his death. “Some say he jumped. Some say he had help,” Walter says. “I’m one of the ‘had-help’ people.”

So is James Starrs, a George Washington University forensic pathologist who examined Olson’s exhumed corpse in 1994 and called the evidence “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.”

Based on that finding, the Manhattan district attorney’s office opened a homicide investigation in 1996. Two cold-case prosecutors, Steve Saracco and Daniel Bibb, conducted dozens of interviews, hunted records at the CIA and went to California with a court order to question CIA retiree Robert V. Lashbrook, who shared Olson’s room the night he died. (Like everyone known to be directly involved, Lashbrook is now dead.)

In 2001, they gave up.

“We could never prove it was murder,” says Saracco.
But Saracco, now retired, found plenty to fuel his suspicions: a hotel room so cramped it was hard to imagine Olson vaulting through the closed window; motives to shut Olson up; the ambiguous autopsy; and the CIA assassination manual.

“Whether the manual is a complete coincidence, I don’t know,” Saracco says. “But it was very disturbing to see that a CIA manual suggested the exact method of Frank Olson’s death.”

Covert work

For 20 years after its creation in 1949, Detrick’s Special Operations Division developed covert germ weapons – dart guns and aerosol sprayers to assassinate foreign enemies.

There is no evidence they were ever used. In fact, the only death that clearly resulted from the program was that of Frank Olson, one of its senior officers.

The son of Swedish immigrants, Frank Rudolph Olson earned a doctorate in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin and joined the World War II bioweapons program at what was then Camp Detrick.

In 1949, Olson was recruited by Detrick’s Special Operations Division. Within months, the Korean War was raging, Sen. Joseph McCarthy was launching his hunt for Communist agents, and pressure was on to build new U.S. germ weapons.

By 1951, the Special Operations Division had won praise from a Pentagon committee for the “the originality, imagination and aggressiveness it has displayed in devising means and mechanisms for the covert dissemination of bacteriological warfare agents.”

In October 1952, Olson was promoted to acting director of the division. Although his family didn’t know it, he had also been recruited by the CIA for a program code-named Artichoke, part of a decades-long hunt for drugs to make enemy prisoners spill their secrets.

As his career prospered, Olson and his wife, Alice, built a dream house on a hillside above Frederick. They became regulars at Detrick’s officers’ club.

“He and his wife were both fun people,” recalls Curtis B. Thorne, a Detrick veteran who pioneered anthrax studies at the University of Massachusetts.

But promotions and parties concealed Olson’s qualms about his work. Suffering from ulcers, he left the Army and stayed on at Detrick as a civilian – though he bridled at the Army’s strict oversight. A 1949 security document reported: “Olson is violently opposed to control of scientific research, either military or otherwise, and opposes supervision of his work.”

The same year, colleagues recall, Olson was influenced by a new book by a mentor. In Peace or Pestilence: Biological Warfare and How To Avoid It, Theodor Rosebury said science should combat disease, not find devious ways to spread it.

Cournoyer, the Army intelligence veteran, says Olson began to raise ethical issues the friends had discussed during night courses in philosophy at the Catholic University of America. Colleagues were astonished to spot Olson chatting with the pacifists who protested outside Detrick’s gates.

“He was turning, no doubt about it,” Cournoyer says.
By the fall of 1953, according to Cournoyer, Olson was approaching a crisis of conscience. He had witnessed “special interrogations” of prisoners under the Artichoke program during a secret trip to Europe in July.

After returning, Cournoyer recalls, Olson asked, “Have you ever seen a man die?”

“He actually called it torture,” Cournoyer recalls. “He said they went so far as to take a life – lives, definitely more than one. Whatever they got out of them, he didn’t consider it worth a life.”

One colleague, who spoke on condition of anonymity, thinks Olson was upset because he believed the U.S. had used biological weapons against North Korea. Two Canadian researchers, Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, wrote a 1998 book arguing that such attacks occurred.

But the U.S. government has long denied using bioweapons, and most U.S. experts reject the charge. The issue may not be resolved until all the relevant documents are declassified, if ever.

Whatever its source, Olson’s disillusionment came to a head after the LSD experiment on Nov. 19, 1953, at a rented cabin on Deep Creek Lake in Western Maryland. Olson – who had stepped down to deputy chief of Special Operations – joined six Army colleagues and three CIA men led by Sidney Gottlieb, the eccentric and powerful CIA liaison to Detrick.

By his own account, Gottlieb served Cointreau to seven of the men without telling them he had laced it with LSD, ostensibly to study the drug’s effects.

A ‘terrible mistake’

Alice Olson would recall that her husband returned home deeply depressed. He told her he had made a “terrible mistake” but wouldn’t elaborate. He said he planned to leave the Army and retrain as a dentist.

According to the official CIA version of events, made public in 1975, Olson became increasingly despondent and paranoid. On Nov. 24, concerned colleagues took him to New York to see a doctor, Harold Abramson, who had experimented with LSD.

Three days later, Olson agreed to be admitted to a Rockville psychiatric hospital. He and CIA officer Robert Lashbrook decided to spend the night at the Statler and head south the next morning.

But at 2:45 a.m., Lashbrook told investigators, he awoke to the sound of breaking glass. Olson had thrown himself through the closed shade and closed window, falling 170 feet to his death on the sidewalk below.

From 1953 to 1975, as Alice Olson descended into alcoholism and fought back to sobriety, she and her children were told nothing about LSD. When the story finally surfaced in the Rockefeller Commission report on CIA abuses, they got official apologies from President Ford and from CIA Director William Colby, who handed over CIA documents on the case. They later received $750,000 in compensation.

But 22 years of deception made it difficult to persuade the family that the new official story was the whole truth.

The betrayal was deeply personal. The LSD cover-up had involved Frank Olson’s colleagues, particularly his boss, the late Col. Vincent Ruwet – who had consoled Eric with the gift of a darkroom set and a jigsaw after his father’s death.

“Whenever suspicions came up, the family would say: ‘This can’t be correct, because Ruwet would have known, and Ruwet wouldn’t deceive us.’ Our relationship to Ruwet was symbolic of our relationship to the whole Detrick community,” Eric said.

As a teenager, Eric was a patriotic member of that community, where he became an Eagle Scout in the base-sponsored troop. But in college and graduate school, he grew skeptical.

If his mother shared his doubts, Eric said, she never acted on them: “My mother’s mantra was: ‘You are never going to know what happened in that hotel room.’ It’s an injunction, a kind of threat, a taboo and a prediction.”

Eric’s younger sister, Lisa, was killed in a 1978 plane crash along with her husband and 2-year-old son. Ironically, she died on the way to inspect a lumber mill as a place to invest her share of the government’s compensation for Frank’s death.

His brother, Nils, who was only 5 in 1953, consciously chose dentistry, the alternate career his father had considered.

But Eric, the eldest, couldn’t settle down. He moved to Sweden, his father’s ancestral home, and had a son, Stephan, with a Swedish woman. Then he returned to the family home, determined to explain his father’s death.

One clue came from Armand Pastore, the assistant night manager at the Statler in 1953. He approached the family in 1975 to report what he’d heard from the hotel switchboard operator that night. Immediately after Olson’s fall, CIA officer Lashbrook phoned Abramson, the physician. Instead of shocked and emotional voices, the operator had told Pastore, there was a brief and seemingly expected exchange.

“He’s gone,” Lashbrook said.

“That’s too bad,” Abramson reportedly answered.

A similar impression came from a CIA investigator’s report in Colby’s documents. Dispatched to New York immediately after Olson’s death, the investigator listened through a closed door as Abramson told Lashbrook he was “worried as to whether or not the deal was in jeopardy” and thought “the whole operation was dangerous and the whole deal should be reanalyzed.”

In a report to the CIA on the death, Abramson wrote that the LSD experiment was designed “especially to trap [Olson].” This conflicted with Gottlieb’s story and raised a troubling possibility: that the LSD experiment was actually designed to see whether Olson could still be trusted to keep the agency’s dark secrets.

And there was Frank Olson’s mummified body, exhumed in 1994, the year after Alice Olson died. Starrs, the pathologist, found none of the facial cuts the original autopsy described, but he did find a contusion to the head that he thought was caused by a blow struck before the fall.

All these anomalies Eric Olson has duly recorded on a Web site devoted to his father’s memory: www.frankolsonproject.org.

A half-century after his father’s death, Eric Olson seems to be struggling to put it behind him. He says he believes he knows what happened, even if he doesn’t know details of perpetrators and motives. “You can see the truth through the fog,” he says. “But you can’t quite make out what it is.”

Sometimes, in moments of frustration – which come often because he’s struggling to earn a living – he says he’s sorry he ever looked into his father’s death.

“I’ve ruined my life,” he says in one interview. “I regret everything. I regret digging my father’s body up … . For me, the end has come with facing a hard truth, confronting my own naivete. I thought I wanted knowledge. I didn’t think that if knowledge is knowledge of murder, then it’s not enough – because then you want justice. And you don’t get justice with a secret state murder.”

At other times, he seems eager for any new scrap of information. He explains the contradiction by citing the Shakespearean son who pursues the truth about his father’s murder.

“Read Hamlet,” he says. “Hamlet has become like a friend to me. Once you start looking into your father’s death, you go to the end.”

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Unpublished letter to the editor, The New Yorker, in response to Louis Menand’s “Brainwashed: Where the ‘Manchurian Candidate’ came from.”

September 12, 2003To the editor, The New Yorker

In his essay “Brainwashed: Where the ‘Manchurian Candidate’ came from” Louis Menand suggests that the charge made by brainwashed American pilots that the US had engaged in germ warfare during the Korean War was “untrue but widely believed in many countries.” Menand implies that this controversial issue is far more settled than is in fact the case.

A new documentary film, “Code Name Artichoke” (produced this year by German public television and widely shown internationally and in the US on WorldLink TV) on the death of my father, Dr. Frank Olson, revisits this question and presents new evidence. (See this link for a transcript of the film.)

In the year before his death in 1953 my father, a biochemist, was acting chief of the Special Operations Division (essentially an off-campus CIA BW lab) at the Army’s center for biological warfare at Camp Detrick, Maryland. This position put him on the boundary between biological warfare and interrogation research, precisely the strange boundary zone evoked in the term “germ warfare confessions.” The conventional wisdom alleges that in November 1953 he threw himself out of a 13th floor window of the Statler Hotel in New York (now the Hotel Pennsylvania) after having himself been drugged with LSD by the CIA in a mind control experiment. This version of events comprises the core chapter of John Marks’ 1979 book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. (Times Books)

“Code Name Artichoke” shows that my father became convinced that the US was using biological weapons in Korea, at least on an experimental basis. The film juxtaposes footage of an American pilot making these claims with footage in which this same serviceman subsequently recants his “germ warfare confession.” The question as to which of these statements is the product of indoctrination is thereby starkly posed, with the implication that the notion of brainwashing was, among other things, a powerful tool for psychological discrediting.

Sincerely,Eric Olson, PhD

CLOSE

MEMORANDUM

OVERVIEW
This memo sets out the information provided by both Dr William Sargant, consultant psychiatrist, and William Buckley, former Station Chief of the CIA in Beirut, Lebanon. Both believed your father was murdered by the CIA. To judge my credibility in accepting this claim I begin with:

PERSONAL BACKGROUND:
I am the author of thirty eight books published world wide. Total sales exceed 45 million copies. Five of my books have been made into successful motion pictures, including the Academy Award winning Voyage of the Damned. My other awards include the Critics; and Jurys’ prizes at the Monte Carlo Film Festival, an Edgar Allen Poe Award and three citations from the Mark Twain Society for Reporting Excellence.

I have written a number of non-fiction books dealing with the activities of various intelligence agencies. in 1998 1 wrote and presented for Britain’s Channel 4, “The Spying Machine”, a major television documentary in which for the first time key members of Mossad appeared, describing their work. My latest book on the Israeli service, “Gideon’s Spies,” to be published by St Martin’s Press in New York, will be published in 40 countries in April 1999.

In the 1950/60 period that is relevant to the events surrounding your father, I was a senior BBC writer/producer employed by the Science Department. Dr Sargant was engaged by me as a consultant for a number of programmes. A relationship developed between us that became close and remained so until his death in 1988.

The first lesson I learned during what has been a quarter of a century of writing about secret intelligence is that deception and disinformation are its stock-in-trade, along with subversion, corruption, blackmail and sometimes assassination. Agents are trained to lie and to use and abuse friendships. They are the very opposite of the dictum that gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.

I first encountered their behaviour while investigating many of the great spy scandals of the Cold War: the betrayal of America’s atomic bomb secrets by Klaus Fuchs and the compromising of Britain’s M15 and M16 by Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Kim Philby. Each made treachery and duplicity his byword. I also was one of the first writers to uncover the CIA’s obsession with mind control, a preoccupation the Agency was forced to confirm ten years after my book on the subject, Journey into Madness, appeared. Denial is the black art all intelligence services long ago perfected.

Nevertheless, in getting to the truth, I was greatly helped by two professional intelligence officers: Joachim Kraner, my late father-in-law, who ran an M16 network in Dresden in the post-World War II years, and Bill Buckley who was station chief of the CIA in Beirut in the 1980s. Both constantly reminded me that a great deal can be heard from what Bill called “murmurs in the mush;” a deadly skirmish fought in an alley with no name; the collective hold-your breath when an agent or network is blown; a covert operation which could have undone years of overt political bridge-building; a snippet of mundane information that completed a particular intelligence jigsaw. Through them I made contacts in a number of military and civilian intelligence agencies, Germany’s BND and France’s DGSE; the CIA; Canadian and British services. Later that network extended to include members of Israel’s security services including senior members of Mossad.

It is these contacts who have helped to reinforce the belief of both William Sargant and Bill Buckley that your father was murdered. I am assured that because of the highly unusual circumstances of your father’s death, the details have remained on file with several of the above-mentioned agencies, specifically the Mossad. The circumstances surrounding the death are taught as a case study at the Mossad Training School outside Tel Aviv. This has been confirmed by two former Mossad agents, Ari Ben-Menashe and Victor Ostrovsky.

Let me now turn to the specific information that both William Sargant and Bill Buckley provided me with on separate occasions over a number of years. At that time they were both alive and spoke on the usual understanding we had: that what they had to say would not be directly sourced to them. Both made a specific request that I should not publish ‘in any form’ what they told me about your father’s death because, as they believed they were among the few who knew the true circumstances, publication of such information could almost certainly be traced back to them. Given the circumstances they outlined, the outcome for either of them could be severe.

So: First to William Sargant,

At the time we spoke of your father, Dr Sargant was Director of Psychological Medicine at St Thomas’ Hospital, London, England. He was also a consultant to the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI5/6), largely because of his work in the eliciting of confessions by the Soviets. His conclusions can be found in his textbook “Battle for the Mind”; it remains a standard work on the subject of mind control

Because of my own family connections (detailed above), I was able to gain the trust of Dr Sargent. This developed during the time I used him in various documentary programmes for the BBC. It was during that period (1968169), that I first began to explore with him his own relationship with both M15/6 and the CIA. He told me lie had visited Langley several times and had met with Dr Sydney Gottlieb, Richard Helms and other senior CIA officials. During those visits he had also met with Dr Ewan Cameron and, on one occasion, he had met Dr Lashbrook and your father, Frank Olson.

Subsequently Dr Gottlieb and Frank Olson visited London and, according to Dr Sargent, he accompanied them to Porton Down, Britain’s main research centre for biological/chemical research. Dr Sargent’s interest in the work going on there was to study the psychological implications of mind-blowing drugs such as LSD.

He told me that he developed a rapport with Frank Olson during a number of subsequent visits Frank Olson made to Britain. Dr Sargant remarked that “he was just like any other CIA spy, using our secret airfields to come and go”. Evidence in support of that can be found in Frank Olson’s passport.

During this period (1953/5), Dr Sargant had met several more times with Dr Ewan Cameron, both in Washington and in Montreal, Canada. Cameron was engaged in secret experimental work for the CIA (details of that can be found in my book Journey into Madness).

Sargent said he knew that Frank Olson and Cameron knew each other and that Frank Olson also shared his (Sargant’s) view that some of the work Dr Gottlieb was funding Cameron to do through the Human Ecology Foundation (a CIAfront Organisation, was bordering on the criminal.

During the research and writing of Journey into Madness, Dr Sargent and I met on many occasions, perhaps as many as 20. During that time he gave me much valuable material relating to the work of Dr Cameron and insights into what he knew of Dr Gottlieb, Richard Helms and, of course, the death of your father.

By then, Dr Sargant was physically not a well man but his memory was still good. He could remember exact details with compelling clarity; for instance we once had a somewhat esoteric; conversation on how Patty Hearst (whom he had seen during her trial as an expert witness) would have survived some of the techniques that the CIA had developed in mind control.

From time to time, he referred to the death of your father and, as I clearly recall, he said his paperwork on the case had been handed over to the competent authorities in the British Secret Intelligence Service.

Time and again Dr Sargant expressed the view that, from all he had learned from the M15 and his own contacts in Washington, there was a strong prima facie case that Frank Olson had been murdered. Sargant believed that Frank Olson could also have been given a cocktail of drugs that included more than LSD. He said he knew that Dr Gottlieb had been researching into slow-acting depressants which, when taken, could drive a person to suicide.

He also believed that, from his own meetings with Frank Olson, there was a very real possibility that your father could become a whistle-blower if he believed that what was happening was wrong.

After my book was published, I continued to meet with Dr Sargent. At that time, I was hoping to see a new edition of the book published (this was not to be) and I wanted to get Dr Sargant’s permission to use all he had told me in a new edition. He said I could only publish what he had said after his death. He died in 1988. This Is the account he gave me of your father’s death which I now feel free to make public.
in the summer of 1953 Frank Olson travelled to Britain, once again to visit Parton Down. Sargent met with him. Olson said he was going to Europe to meet with a CIA team led by Dr Gottlieb. By then Sargent had learned that Frank Olson was acting deputy head of SO (Special Operations).

Sargent was satisfied that the CIA team were doing similar work that M16 were conducting in Europe – executing without trial known Nazis, especially SS men. (One of the survivors of the British “hit squad” is Peter Mason who lives in Montana: I know nothing about him).

Sargant saw Frank Olson after his brief visit to Norway and West Germany, including Berlin, in the summer of 1953. He said he was concerned about the psychological changes in Frank Olson. In Sargent’s view Olson, primarily a researchbased scientist, had witnessed in the field how his arsenal of drugs, etc. worked with lethal effect on human beings (the “expendable” SS men etc.). Sargant believed that for the first time Olson had come face to face with his own reality.

Sargant told me he believed Frank Olson had witnessed murder being committed with the various drugs he had prepared. The shock of what he witnessed, Sargent believed, was all the harder to cope with given that Frank Olson was a patriotic man who believed that the United States would never sanction such acts. Part of that assumption was formed by Sargent because he had come to see Frank Olson as a somewhat naive man: “locked up in his lab mentality” was, I recall, one of the phrases Sargant used.

I remember Sargent telling me that he spoke several times in 1953 with Frank Olson at Sargent’s consulting rooms in Harley Street, London. These were not formal patient/doctor consultations but rather Sargent trying to establish what Frank Olson had seen and done in Europe.

He decided that Frank Olson could pose a security risk if he continued to speak and behave as he did. He recommended to his own superiors at the SIS that Frank Olson should no longer have access to Portion Down or to any ongoing British research at the various secret establishments Olson had been allowed prior free access to.

Sargent told me his recommendation was acted upon by his superiors. He was also certain that his superiors, by the nature of the close ties with the CIA, would have informed Richard Helms and Dr Gottlieb of the circumstances why Frank Olson would no longer be given access to British research. Effectively a substantial part of Frank Olson’s importance to the CIA had been cut off.

When Dr Sargant learned of Frank Olson’s death — I recall him telling me it came in a priority message from the British Embassy in Washington Sargant came to the immediate conclusion that Olson could only have been murdered. I recall him telling me that in many ways the staged death was almost classic.

BILL BUCKLEY, Station Chief of the CIA in Beirut (1983).

Again through my family connection and the contacts I had established independently with various Intelligence services, I came to know Bill Buckley. (see pp Chap 4, “Journey into Madness”). At various stages in our friendship the question of Frank Olson’s death came up.

I told Bill what Dr Sargant believed. Bill said that Sargant was right but that he was sure that Richard Helms and Sydney Gottlieb would have ensured that nothing would ever be proven. Buckley described both men as expert in hiding or destroying evidence.

I hope this helps to set the record straight.
Gordon Thomas

Also by Gordon Thomas:

Non-Fiction:
DESCENT INTO DANGER
BED OF NAILS
PHYSICIAN EXTRAORDINARY
HEROES OF THE R.A.F.
THEY GOT BACK
MIRACLE OF SURGERY
THE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE AND YOU
THAMES NUMBER ONE
MIDNIGHT TRADER$
THE PARENT’S HOME DOCTOR (with lan D Hudson, Vincent Pippet)
TURN BY THE WIN DOW (with Ronald Hutchinson)
ISSELS: THE BIOGRAPHY OF A DOCTOR
THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED (with Max MorganWitts)
EARTHQUAKE (with Max MorganWitts)
SHIPWRECK (with Max MorganWitts)
VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED (with Max MorganWitts)
THE DAY GUERNICA DIED (with Max MorganWitts)
ENOLA GAY/RUIN FROM THE AIR (with Max MorganWitts)
THE DAY THE BUBBLE BURST (With Max MorganWifts)
TRAUMA (with Max MorganWitts)
PONTIFF (with Max MorganWitts)
THE YEAR OF ARMAGEDDON (with Max MorganWitts)
THE OPERATION
DESIRE AND DENIAL
THE TRIAL: The Life and Inevitable Crucifixion of Jesus
JOURNEY INTO MADNESS
ENSLAVED
CHAOS UNDER HEAVEN
TRESPASS INTO TEMPTATION
GIDEON’S SPIES
MAGDALENE

In an attempt to make America’s biological arsenal more lethal during the Cold War, the Army collected anthrax from the bodies or blood of workers at Fort Detrick who were accidentally infected with the bacteria, veterans of the biowarfare program say.

The experiments, during the 1950s and ’60s, were based on long experience with animals showing that anthrax often becomes more virulent after infecting an animal and growing in its body, according to experts on the bacteria and scientific studies published at the time. Former Army scientists say the anthrax strain used to make weapons was replaced at least once, and possibly three times, with more potent anthrax that had grown in the workers’ bodies. But some of the key scientists who did the work more than four decades ago are dead, and records are classified, contradictory or nonexistent, so it is difficult to establish with certainty the details of what happened.

The use of human accident victims to boost the killing power of the nation’s germ arsenal is a macabre footnote to a top-secret program designed to destroy enemy troops with such exotic weapons as botulism, smallpox, plague and paralytic shellfish poison.

The offensive bioweapons program was launched during World War II and ended by President Richard M. Nixon in 1969.

Today, after a few grams of mailed anthrax have killed five people, sickened 13 others and disrupted the postal system and government, the old program’s gruesome potential for destruction seems unimaginable. But at the time, fearing correctly that the Soviet Union had an even larger bioweapons program, Army scientists were driven to come up with more and more lethal disease strains.”

Any deadly diseases, anywhere in the world, we’d go and collect a sample,” said Bill Walter, 76, who worked in the weapons program from 1951 until it closed.

Walter was involved in anthrax production from selection of seed stock to the dry, deadly spore powder ready to be loaded into a bomb; his final job was as “principal investigator” in a lab that studied anthrax and other powder weapons.

Walter believes the original weapons strain of anthrax, a variety called Vollum after the British scientist who isolated it, was upgraded with bacteria collected from three Detrick workers who were accidentally infected. Two of them died.

His recollection is supported by another veteran of the anthrax program, 84-year-old James R.E. Smith. A third bioweapons veteran, William C. Patrick III, confirms two of the cases but says he is not sure about the third.”

Anthrax gets stronger as it goes through a human host,” said Walter, now retired in Florida. “So we got pulmonary [lung] spores from Bill Boyles and Joel Willard. And finally we got it from Lefty Kreh’s finger.”

William A. Boyles, a 46-year-old microbiologist, inhaled anthrax spores on the job in 1951 and died a few days later. Seven years after that, Joel E. Willard, 53, an electrician who worked in the “hot” areas where animals were dosed with deadly germs, died of the same inhalational form of the disease.

The third anthrax victim, Bernard “Lefty” Kreh, was a plant operator who spent night shifts in a biohazard suit, breathing air from a tube on the wall, using a kitchen spatula to scrape the anthrax “mud” off the inside of a centrifuge. One day in the late ’50s or early ’60s, his finger swelled to the size of a sausage with a cutaneous, or skin, anthrax infection.

Kreh went on to become a nationally known outdoors writer and expert on fly fishing. He did not know that the bacteria that had put him in Fort Detrick’s hospital for a month had gone on to another life, too – as a sub-strain of anthrax bearing his initials.

“We called it `LK’ – that’s what we’d put on the log sheets for each run,” Walter said. A “run” was an 1,800-gallon batch of anthrax mixture, grown in one of the 40-foot- high fermenters inside Building 470, which stands empty at Detrick, its demolition planned.

“Lefty’s strain was rather easy to detect,” Walter said. When a colony of bacteria grew on growth medium, he recalled, “it came out like a little comma, perfectly spherical.”

Surprised by his role

Orley R. Bourland Jr., 75, who worked as a plant manager, said anthrax from Kreh’s finger was isolated and designated “BVK-1,” for Bernard Victor Kreh.

Walter said he assumes the initials in the log sheets were shortened by someone who knew the source of the new sub-strain of anthrax never went by his formal name. Yet in the secret, compartmented biological program, Kreh himself does not recall ever being informed of the use to which his government put his illness.

“You’re kidding,” Kreh said. “I’ll have to tell my wife.” He doesn’t remember which finger it was, he said, but he does remember that his wife, Evelyn, could see him only through a glass barrier designed to keep any dangerous microbes contained during treatment

.

At 77, Kreh, who lives in Cockeysville, lives the full life of a fishing celebrity, writing magazine articles, taking VIPs on fly-fishing expeditions and endorsing products. A former outdoors columnist for The Sun, he credits his 19 years at Fort Detrick with giving him time to develop his expertise. Because of the rotating night-shift work, he said, “Two out of three weeks I could hunt and fish all day long.”

The available evidence confirming the use of bacteria from the two men who died, Boyles and Willard, is less complete. W. Irving Jones Jr., 80, of Frederick, a biochemist, remembers his supervisor, Dr. Ralph E. Lincoln, giving him an unusual request some months after the electrician’s death.

“Dr. Lincoln had me pull a sample of Willard’s dried blood,” Jones said. “We were able to grow [the anthrax bacteria] right up. And it was deadly,” a determination he made by testing it on animals.

Jones said he cannot confirm the recollection of others that Willard’s sub-strain of anthrax was used for a new weapons strain. That might well have happened, he said, if animal tests showed it to be more virulent than the existing weapons strain, the only means of checking potency at the time. But like any secret program, the Army’s biowarfare operation was run on a “need-to-know” basis, and weapons development was not his bailiwick, Jones said.

Contradictory evidence

The evidence on Boyles is contradictory. Patrick, who joined the bioweapons program in 1951, the year the microbiologist died of anthrax, said unequivocally that the Vollum weapons strain was altered by passage through Boyles’ body and became Vollum 1B.

“That’s where Vollum 1B came from,” said Patrick, of Frederick, who eventually headed Detrick’s product development division. “It’s 1-Boyles.”

A review of scientific papers on anthrax published by Fort Detrick scientists in the 1940s and ’50s offers indirect support for Patrick’s contention. The Vollum strain found in the early Detrick papers is first replaced by a Vollum sub-strain called “M36,” produced by the British biological weapons program by passing the Vollum strain through a series of monkeys to increase its virulence.

Then, in the late 1950s, references to the M36 variant of Vollum give way to references to “the highly virulent Vollum 1B strain.” No 1A strain seems to have existed. Nor is there an explanation of the 1B sub-strain’s origin – a break with the standard practice in describing sub-strains derived from passage through animals.

On the other hand, a medical report prepared by the Army 18 years after Boyles’ death states that live anthrax bacteria “could not be (and never was) cultivated from blood, sputum, nose and throat, or skin at any time during the illness, not from tissue and fluids taken at autopsy.

“The cause of death was confirmed by an autopsy finding of bacteria resembling anthrax in the brain.

The absence of live bacteria may have a simple explanation. Doctors say a person with inhalation anthrax who is given intravenous antibiotics might soon show no live bacteria, even though the person might still die of toxin produced earlier by the bacteria. But if the medical report is accurate, it appears to rule out the possibility that the weapons strain included bacteria collected during or after Boyles’ illness.

It is possible that after Boyles’ death, blood taken early in his illness was found to contain anthrax. Or, anthrax spores, which are not killed by antibiotics, might have been found in his lungs after death.

Scientists say it is possible, but not certain, that one pass through a human host would boost the virulence of anthrax. Repeated passes through a particular species usually increase the bacteria’s lethality toward that species, said David L. Huxsoll, who oversaw anthrax vaccine tests as commander of the Army’s biodefense center in the 1980s.

“If you pass it through a rabbit repeatedly, it will kill rabbits, but it won’t kill a cow,” Huxsoll said. In humans, “you could have a switch toward more virulence on one passage, but it wouldn’t necessarily happen.”

Officials of the biological defense program at Fort Detrick, where Vollum 1B is still used to test vaccines, do not know of any connection to the accidental human infections, said Caree Vander Linden, spokeswoman for the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. One account passed down by a former staff member was that Vollum 1B was produced by passage of the Vollum strain through rabbits, she said.

If the “B” actually stands for Boyles, it’s news to William Boyles’ family. Natalie Boyles said Friday that her husband, Charles M. Boyles, William’s son, had never heard of such a thing.

Kenneth E. Willard, Joel Willard’s son, said the same. “Shock would be my first feeling,” Willard said on hearing the evidence described in this article. “Second would be that my mother or I should have been made aware of it, if it happened. We should have been given more information all along.”

But secrecy governed everything in the program, including the deaths, because the American bioweapons makers had a keen awareness of the threat from their counterparts in the Soviet Union, occasionally supplemented by detailed information.

“We used to get intelligence reports telling me what my Russian counterpart was doing,” Walter said. “Our rate and the Russian rate was the same – about 7 kilograms of dry anthrax a week.”

Another parallel exists. If the United States took advantage of tragic accidents to make its anthrax deadlier, those experiments were mirrored at least once in the Soviet program. Far larger than the U.S. effort, the Soviet biowarfare program was also secretly continued after 1972, when the nations signed a treaty banning such work.

According to Ken Alibek, a former deputy chief of the Soviet program who defected to the United States in 1992, a scientist named Nikolai Ustinov accidentally pricked himself while injecting a guinea pig with Marburg virus in 1988. He died an agonizing death two weeks later.

“No one needed to debate the next step,” Alibek wrote in his 1999 book Biohazard. “Orders went out immediately to replace the old strain with the new, which was called, in a move the wry Ustinov might have appreciated, `Variant U.'”

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Altered States of America

By Richard StrattonSpin Magazine, March 1994

In the early 195O’s the US chased the world’s LSD supply as just the first step in a debauched CIA program code-named MK-ULTRA. In an exclusive interview, Ike Feldman, one of the operation’s kingpins, talks to Richard Stratton about deadly viruses, spy hookers, and bad trips.

“I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vinyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”—George Hunter White

The meeting was set for noon at a suitably anonymous bastion of corporate America, a sprawling Marriott Hotel and convention center on Long Island. Driving out of the city, I was tense and paranoid. For one thing, I was leaving Manhattan without permission from my parole officer, What was I going to tell him? “I want to travel to Long Island to interview a former narcotics agent who worked undercover for the CIA dosing people with LSD.” My parole officer would have ordered a urine test on the spot.

Then there was the fact that previous run-ins with drug cops had usually resulted in criminal prosecutions. I spent most of the ’80s in prison for smuggling marijuana. How would this ex-agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (BBN), forerunner of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) take to a retired outlaw writing a story about M K-ULTRA, the CIA’s highly secretive mind-control and drug-testing program?

Ira “Ike” Feldman is the only person still alive who worked directly under the legendary George Hunter White in MK-ULTRA. The program began in 1953 amid growing fear of the Soviet Union’s potential for developing alternative weaponry. The atomic bomb was a sinister threat, but more terrifying still were possible Soviet assaults on the mind and body from within — through drugs and disease. In an attempt to preempt foreign attacks and even wage its own assaults, the CIA funded a group of renegade agents to experiment with ways to derail a human being.

For years, Feldman had ducked reporters. He agreed to meet with me only after a private detective, a former New York cop who also did time for drugs. put in a good word. There was no guarantee Feldman would talk.

The LSD, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Write this down. Espionage. Assassinations. The study of prostitutes for clandestine use. That’s what I was doing when I worked for the CIA.

I recognized Feldman immediately when he waddled into the lobby of the Marriott. I had heard he was short, five three, and I’d read how George White used to dress him in a pinstriped zoot suit, blue suede shoes, a Bursalino hat with a tu rned-up brim, and a phony diamond ring, then send him onto the streets of San Francisco to pose as an East Coast heroin dealer. Now in his 70s, Feldman still looks and talks like Edward G. Robinson playing gangster Johnny Rocco in Key Largo.

Feldman leveled a cold, lizard-like gaze on me when we sat down for lunch. He wielded a fat unlit cigar like a baton, pulled out a wad of bills that could have gagged a drug dealer, slipped a 20 to the waitress and told her to take good care of us.

“What’s this about?” Feldman demanded. “Who the fuck are you?”

I explained I was a writer researching George White. White, a world-class drinker known to polish off a bottle of gin at a sitting and get up and walk away, died of liver disease in 1975, two years before MK-ULTRA was first made public.

“Why do you want to write about White? I suppose it’s this LSD shit.”

No, I said, not just the LSD. George White deserved to have his story told..

“White was a son of a bitch,” Feldman said. “But he was a great cop. He made that fruitcake Hoover look like Nancy Drew.”

Again he gazed stonily at me. “Lots of writers asked me to tell my story. Why should I talk to you?”

I decided to come clean. “I used to be part of your world,” I answered. “I did eight years for the Feds because I refused to rat when I got busted for pot.”

Feldman stared at me for a long time. “I know,” he said. “I checked you out. That’s why I’m here. Now get out your pencil.” He waved for the waitress and palmed her a 50 to cover the tab.

“The LSD,” Feldman began, “that was just the tip of the iceberg. Write this down. Espionage. Assassinations. Dirty tricks. Drug experiments. Sexual encounters and the study of prostitutes for clandestine use. That’s what I was doing when I worked for George White and the CIA.”

For my next Interview with Feldman, I rented a day room at the Marriott and brought along a tape recorder. Feldman tottered in, pulled a small footballshaped clear plastic ampule out of his pocket and plunked it on the table. It was filled with pure Sandoz LSD-25. He also showed me a gun disguised as a fountain pen which could shoot a cartridge of nerve gas. “Some of the stuff George White and I tested,” he explained.

“It all began because the CIA knew the Russians had this LSD shit and they were afraid the KGB was using it to brainwash agents,” Feldman told me. “They were worried they might dump it in the water supply and drive everybody wacky. They wanted us to find out if we could actually use it as a truth serum.”

Actually, it all began with a mistake. In 1951, Allen Dulles, later appointed director of Central Intelligence, received a report from military sources that the Russians had bought 50 million doses of a new drug from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel, Switzerland. A follow-up memo stated that Sandoz had an additional ten kilos – about 100 million doses – of the drug, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25), available for sale on the open market

Dulles was alarmed. From the beginning, LSD was lauded by military and intelligence scientists working on chemical warfare compounds and mind-control experiments as the most potent mind-altering substance known to man. “Infinitesimally small amounts of LSD can completely destroy the sanity of a human being for considerable periods of time (or possibly permanently),” stated an October 1953 CIA memo. In the wrong hands, 100 million doses would be enough to sabotage a whole nation’s mental equilibrium.

Dulles convened a high-level committee of CIA and Pentagon officials who agreed the agency should buy the entire Sandoz LSD supply lest the KGB acquire it first. Two agents were dispatched to Switzerland with a black bag containing $240,000.

In fact, Sandoz had produced only about 40 grams of LSD in the ten years since its psychoactive features were first discovered by Albert Hofmann. According to a 1975 CIA document, the U.S. Military attaché in Switzerland had miscalculated by a factor of one million in his CIA reports because he did not know the difference between a milligram (1 /1,000 of a gram) and a kilogram (1,000 grams).

Nevertheless, a deal was struck. The CIA would purchase all of Sandoz’s potential output of LSD. (Later, when the Eli Lilly Company of Indianapolis perfected a process to synthesize LSD, agency officials insisted on a similar agreement.) An internal CIA memo to Dulles declared the agency would have access to “tonnage quantities.” All that remained was for agency heads to figure out what to do with it.

“The objectives were behavior control, behavior anomaly -production, and counter-measures for opposition application of similar substances,” states a heavily redacted CIA document on MK-ULTRA released under a 1977 Freedom of Information Act request, The chill winds of the Cold War were howling across the land. Dulles was convinced that, as he told Princeton University’s National Alumni Conference, Russian and Chinese Communists had secretly developed “brain perversion techniques … so subtle and so abhorrent to our way of life that we have recoiled from facing up to them.”

Pentagon strategists began to envision a day when battles would be fought on psychic terrain in wars without conventional weaponry. The terrifying specter of a secret army of “Manchurian Candidates,” outwardly normal operatives programmed to carry out political assassinations, was paraded before a gullible and easily manipulated public.

Ike Feldman remembers that time well. A Brooklyn boy, he was drafted into the Army in 1941. Army tests showed he had an unusual facility for language, so he was enrolled in a special school in Germany where he learned fluent Russian, By the end of the war, Feldman was a lieutenant colonel with a background in Military Intelligence. The Army sent him to another language school, this time in Monterey, California, where he added Mandarin Chinese:to his repertoire.

While with Military Intelligence in Europe, Feldman first heard of George White. “White was with the OSS [Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA]. I heard stories about him. Donovan [William “Wild Bill” Donovan, founder of the OSS] loved White. White supposedly killed some Japanese spy with his bare hands while he was on assignment in Calcutta. He used to keep a picture of the bloody corpse on the wall in his office.”

In the early ’50s, after a stint in Korea working for the CIA under Army auspices, Feldman decided he’d had enough of military life. He settled in California. “I always wanted chickens,” Feldman recalled, “so I bought a chicken ranch. In the meantime, there wasn’t a hell of a lot to do with chickens.

“Before long, I got a call—this time from White,” Feldman continued. “We understand you’re back in the States,” he says.“I want you to come in to the Bureau of Narcotics.” This was ’54 to ’55, White was District Supervisor [of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics] in San Francisco. I went in. I go to room 144 of the Federal Building, and this is the first time I met George White. He was a big, powerful man with a completely bald head. Not tall, but big. Fat. He shaved his head and had the most beautiful blue eyes you’ve ever seen. “Ike,” he says, “we want you as an agent. We know you’ve been a hell of an agent with Intelligence. The CIA knows it. You speak all these languages. We want you to work as an under cover agent in San Francisco.”

What Feldman didn’t know at the time was that George White was still working for the CIA. White’s particular area of expertise was the testing of drugs on unwitting human guinea pigs. During the war, one of White’s projects for the OSS was the quest for a “truth drug,” a serum that could be administered to prisoners of war or captured spies during interrogations. After trying and rejecting several substances the OSS scientists settled on a highly concentrated liquid extract of cannabis indica, a particularly potent strain of marijuana. Never one to shrink from the call of duty, White first tried the drug on himself. He downed a full vial of the clear, viscous liquid and soon passed out without revealing any secrets.

Meanwhile, at the CIA’s Technical Services Staff (TSS), the department specializing in unconventional weaponry such as poisons, biological warfare, psychoactive substances, and mind control, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb was searching for a candidate to head MK-ULTRA. Gottlieb, a club-footed scientist who overcame a pronounced stutter in his rise to head the TSS, had discovered White’s name while perusing old OSS files on the Truth Drug Experiments. White’s credentials were impeccable: A former crime reporter on the West Coast before he joined the narcotics bureau, White had soon become one of the top international undercover agents under Harry Anslinger, the grandfather of America’s war on drugs.

After meeting with Gottlieb, White noted his initiation into the world of psychedelics in his diary: “Gottlieb proposes I be CIA consultant and I agree.”

Moonlighting for the CIA, with funds disbursed by Gottlieb, White rented two adjoining apartment safe houses at 81 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village. Using the alias Morgan Hall, he constructed an elaborate alter-identity as a seaman and artist in the Jack London mode. By night, CIA spy Morgan Hall metamorphosed into a drug-eating denizen of the bohemian coffeehouse scene. With a head full of acid and gin, White prowled downtown clubs and bars. He struck up conversations with strangers, then lured them back to the pad where he served drinks spiked with Sandoz’s finest.

“Gloria gets the horrors … Janet sky high,” White dutifully recorded in his diary. In another entry, he proudly noted, “Lashbrook at 81 Bedford Street—Owen Winkle and the LSD surprise—can wash.” In recognition of the often bizarre behavior brought on by the drug, White assigned LSD the codename “Stormy.”

Secret agent man: Allen Dulles (top), the former director of the CIA, who authorized the purchase of Sandoz LSD; George White (middle) examines opium pipes as he takes over as head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in Boston in 1951; Harry Anslinger (bottom), circa 1954, then head of FBN.

According to an agency memo, the CIA feared KGB agents might employ psychedelics “to produce anxiety or terror in medically unsophisticated subjects unable to distinguish drug-induced psychosis from actual insanity.” In an effort to school “enlightened operatives” for that eventuality, Dulles and Gottlieb instructed high-ranking agency personnel, including Gottlieb’s entire staff at TSS, to take LSD themselves and administer it to their colleagues.

“There was an extensive amount of self-experimentation for the reason that we felt that a firsthand knowledge of the subjective effects of these drugs [was] important to those of us who were involved in the program,” Gottlieb explained at a Senate Subcommittee hearing years later. In truth, CIA spooks and scientists alike were tripping their brains out. “I didn’t want to leave it,” one CIA agent said of his first LSD trip “I felt I would be going back to a place where I wouldn’t be able to hold on to this kind of beauty.”

But as covert LSD experiments proliferated, things down at CIA headquarters began to get out of hand. “LSD favors the prepared mind,” wrote Dr. Oscar Janiger, a Los Angeles psychiatrist and early LSD devotee. Non-drug factors such as set and setting—a person’s mental state going into the experience and the surroundings in which the drug is taken—can make all the difference in reactions to a dose of LSD.

Frank Olson was a civilian biochemist working for the Army Chemical Corps’ Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. In another sub-project of MK-ULTRA code-named MK-NAOMI, the CIA had bankrolled SOD to produce and maintain vicious mutant germ strains capable of killing or incapacitating would-be victims. Olson’s specialty at Fort Detrick was delivering deadly diseases in sprays and aerosol emulsions.

Just before Thanksgiving in 1953, at a CIA retreat for a conference on biological warfare, Gottlieb slipped Olson a huge dose of LSD in an after-dinner liqueur. When Gottlieb revealed to the uproarious group that he’d laced the Cointreau, Olson suffered a psychotic snap. “You’re all a bunch of thespians!” Olson shouted at his fellow acid trippers, then spent a long night wandering around babbling to himself.

Back at Fort Detrick, Olson lapsed in and out of depression, began to have grave misgivings about his work, and believed the agency was out to get him Ten days later, he crashed through the tenth-floor window of the Statler Hotel in New York and plummeted to his death on the sidewalk below.

I don’t know if [Olson] jumped or he was pushed. They say he jumped…

“White had been testing the stuff in New York when that guy Olson went out the window and died,” Feldman said. “I don’t know if he jumped or he was pushed. They say he jumped. Anyway, that’s when they shut down the New York operation and moved it to San Francisco.” The Olson affair was successfully covered up by the CIA for over 20 years. White, who had been instrumental in the cover-up, was promoted to district supervisor.

Unfazed by the suicide of their colleague, the CIA’s acid enthusiasts were, in fact, more convinced of the value of their experiments. They would now focus on LSD as a potent new agent for offensive unconven-tional warfare. The drug-testing program resumed in the Bay Area under the cryptonyrn Operation Mid-night Climax. It was then that White hired Feldman.

Posing as Joe Capone, junk dealer and pimp, Feldman infiltrated the seamy North Beach criminal demimonde. “I always wanted to be a gangster,” Feldman told me. “So I was good at it. Before long, I had half a dozen girls working for me. One day, White calls me into his office. ‘Ike,’ he says, ‘you’ve been doing one hell of a job as an undercover man. Now I’m gonna give you another assignment. We want you to test these mind-bending drugs.’ I said, ‘Why the hell do you want to test mind-bending drugs?’ He said, ‘Have you ever heard of The Manchurian Candidate?’ I know about The Manchurian Candidate. In fact, I read the book. ‘Well,’ White said,‘that’s why we have to test these drugs, to find out if they can be used to brainwash people.’ He says, ‘If we can find outjust how good this stuff works, you’ll be doing a great deal for your country.’”

These days, Feldman takes offense at how his work has been charqcterized by former cops who knew him. “I was no pimp,” Feldman insisted. Yet he freely admitted that his role in Midnight Climax was to supply whores. “These cunts all thought I was a racketeer,” Feldman explained. He paid girls $50 to $100 a night to lure johns to a safe house apartment that White had set up on Telegraph Hill with funds provided by the CIA. Unsuspecting clients were served cocktails laced with powerful doses of LSD and other concoctions the CIA sent out to be tested.

“As George White once told me, ‘Ike, your best information outside comes from the whores and the junkies. If you treat a whore nice, she’ll treat you nice. If you treat a junkie nice, he’ll treat you nice.’ But sometimes, when people had information, there was only one way you could get it, If it was a girl, you put her tits in a drawer and slammed the drawer. If it was a guy, you took his cock and you hit it with a hammer. And they would talk to you. Now, with these drugs, you could get information without having to abuse people.”

The “pad,” as White called the CIA safe house, resembled a playboy’s lair, circa 1955. The walls were covered with Toulouse-Lautrec posters of French cancan dancers. In the cabinets were sex toys and photos of manacled women in black fishnet stockings and studded leather halters. White outfitted the place with elaborate bugging equipment, including four microphones disguised as electrical outlets that were connected to tape recorders hidden behind a false wall. While Feldman’s hookers served mind-altering cocktails and frolicked with the johns, White sat on a portable toilet behind the two-way mirror, sipping martinis, watching the experiments, and scribbling notes for his reports to the CIA.

“We tested this stuff they call the Sextender,” Feldman went on. “There was this Russian ship in the harbor. I had a couple of my girls pick up these Russian sailors and bring ’em back to the pad. White wanted to know all kinds of crap, but they weren’t talking. So we had the girls slip ’em this sex drug. It gets your dick up like a rat. Stays up for two hours. These guys went crazy. They fucked these poor girls until they couldn’t walk straight. The girls were complaining they couldn’t take any more screwing. But White found out what he wanted to know. Now this drug, what they call the Sextender, I understand it’s being sold to guys who can’t get a hard-on.”

One such drug, called papavarine, is injected directly into the penis with a half-inch needle containing about two raindrops’ worth of the medicine. “I tell [the men] to thrust it in like a bullfighter finishing off the bull,” said a San Antonio urologist in a recent report on the new therapies used to treat male impo-tence. “Dangers include injecting too much drug, so that an erection can last dangerously long and kill penile tissue.” The potions are not administered orally, as they were by the CIA, because the drug must affect only the penis and not the rest of the body. Drug companies are now working on a cream that can be rubbed directly into the penis before intercourse. Feldman claims we have the CIA to thank for these medical breakthroughs.

“White always wanted to try everything himself,” Feldman remembered. “Whatever drugs they sent out, it didn’t matter, he wanted to see how they worked on him before he tried them on anyone else. He always said he never felt a goddamn thing. He thought it was all bullshit. White drank so much booze, he couldn’t feel his fucking cock.

“This thing” — Feldman held up the fountain pen gas gun — “the boys in Washington sent it out and told us to test the gas. White says to me,’C’mon, Ike. Let’s go outside. I’ll shoot you with it, then you shoot me.” ‘Fuck that,’I said.‘You ain’t gonna shoot me with that crap.’ So we went outside and I shot George White with the gas. He coughed, his face turned red, his eyes started watering. He was choking. Turned out, that stuffwas the prototype for Mace.”

I asked Feldman if he’d ever met Sidney Gottlieb, the elusive scientist who was the brains behind MK-ULTRA. “Several times Sidney Gottlieb came out,” Feldman assured me. “I met Gottlieb at the pad, and at White’s office. White used to send me to the air-port to pick up Sidney and this other wacko, John Gittinger, the psychologist. Sidney was a nice guy. He was a fuckin’ nut. They were all nuts. I says, ‘You’re a good Jewish boy from Brooklyn, like me. What are you doing with these crazy cocksuckers? He had this black bag with him. He says, ‘This is my bag of dirty tricks.’ He had all kinds of crap in that bag. We took a drive over to Muir Woods out by Stinson Beach. Sidney says, ‘Stop the car.’ He pulls out a dart gun and shoots this big eucalyptus tree with a dart. Then he tells me, Come back in two days and check this tree.’ So we go back in two days, the tree was completely dead. Not a leaf left on it. Now that was the forerunner of Agent Orange.

“I went back and I saw White, and he says to me, ‘What do you think of Sidney?’ I said, ‘I think he’s a fuckin’ nut.’ White says,’Well, he may be a nut, but this is the program. This is what we do.’ White thought they were all assholes. He said, ‘These guys are running our Intelligence?’ but they sent George $2,000 a month for the pad, and as long as they paid the bills, we went along with the program.” Gottlieb, who now lives in Virginia, refused to be interviewed for this article.

“Another time, I come back to the pad and the whole joint is littered with these pipe cleaners,” Feldman went on. “I said, ‘Who’s smokin’ a pipe?’ Gittinger, one of those CIA nuts, was there with two of my girls. He had ’am explaining all these different sex acts, the different positions they knew for humping. Now he has them making these little figurines out of the pipe cleaners-men and women screwing in all these different positions. He was taking pictures of the figurines and writing a history of each one. These pipe cleaner histories were sent back to Washington.”

A stated goal of Project MK-ULTRA was to determine “if an individual can be trained to perform an act of attempted assassination involuntarily” while under the influence of various mind-control techniques, and then have no memory of the event later. Feldman told me that in the early ’60s, after the MK-ULTRA program had been around for over a decade, he was summoned to George White’s office. White and CIA director Allen Dulles were there.

“They wanted George to arrange to hit Fidel Castro,” Feldman said. “They were gonna soak his cigars with LSD and drive him crazy. George called me in because I had this whore, one of my whores was this Cuban girl and we were gonna send her down to see Castro with a box of LSD-soaked cigars.”

Dick Russell, author of a recent book on the Kennedy assassination titled The Man Who Knew Too Much, uncovers new evidence to support the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was a product of MK-ULTRA. One of the CIA’s overseas locations for LSD and mindcontrol experiments was Atsugi Naval Air base in Japan where Oswald served as a Marine radar technician. Russell says that after his book was published, a former CIA counter-intelligence expert called him and said Oswald had been “viewed by the CIA as fitting the psychological profile of someone they were looking for in their MK-ULTRA program,” and that he had been mind-conditioned to defect to the USSR.

Robert Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, while working as a horse trainer at the Santa Anita race track near Los Angeles, was introduced to hypnosis and the occult by a fellow groom with shadowy connections. Sirhan has always maintained he has no memory of the night he shot Kennedy,

One of the CIA’s mob contacts long suspected of involvement in John Kennedy’s assassination was the Las Vegas capo mafioso John Roselli. Roselli had risen to prominence in the Mob by taking over the Annenberg-Ragen wire service at Santa Anita, where Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby, sold a handicapper’s tip sheet. Ike Feldman told me Roselli was one of White’s many informants.

“On more than one occasion, White sent me to the airport to pick up John Roselli and bring him to the office,” said Feldman. Roselli was originally from Chicago, where White had served as District Supervisor of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1945 through 1947. Following a big opium smuggling bust in 1947, Jack Ruby was picked up and hauled in for interrogation, then later let off the hook by none other than White. Federal Bureau of Narcotics files indicate Jack Ruby was yet another of White’s legion stool pigeons.

The connections between MK-mind-control experiments, the proliferation of the drug culture, Mob/CIA assassination plots, and the emergence of new, lethal viruses go on and on. Fort Detrick in Maryland, where Frank Olson worked experimenting with viral strains (such as the deadly microbes Sidney Gottlieb personally carried to Africa in an aborted attempt to assassinate Patrice Lumumba), was recently the locale of a near disaster involving an outbreak of a newly emerged virus. The event was chronicled in a lengthy article published in the New Yorker.

Though the New Yorker writer did not make the connection between Fort Detrick, SOD, Frank Olson, and MK-NAOMI, he told of a number of monkeys who all died of a highly infectious virus known as Ebola that first appeared in 55 African villages in 1976, killing nine out of ten of its victims. Some epidemiologists believe AIDS originated in Africa. Feldman claimed the CIA used Africa as a staging ground to test germ warfare because “no one gave a goddamn about any of this crap over there.”

The MK-ULTRA program, the largest domestic operation ever mounted by the CIA, continued well into the ’70s. According to Feldman and other CIA experts, it is still continuing today under an alphabet soup of different cryptonyms. Indeed, one ex-agent told me it would be foolish to think that a program as fruitful as MK-ULTRA would be discontinued. When the agency comes under scrutiny, it simply changes the name of the program and continues unabated.

The public first learned of MK-ULTRA in 1977, with the disclosure of thousands of classified documents and CIA testimony before a Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research chaired by Senator Edward Kennedy. Ike Feldman was subpoenaed and appeared on a panel of witnesses, but the senators failed to ask him a single question. Sidney Gottlieb, complaining of a heart condition, testified at a special semi-public session. He delivered a prepared statement and admitted to having destroyed perhaps one set of files. Another set was turned over to Senate investigators. The full extent of the CIA’s activities under the rubric of MK-ULTRA may never be known.

George White retired from the Narcotics Bureau in 1965. The last ten years of his life, he lived in Stinson Beach, California, where, known as Colonel White, he went on the wagon for a few years and became chief of the volunteer fire department. Local residents remember him once turning in four kids for smoking pot, and in another incident, spraying a preacher and his congregation with water at a beach picnic. He was also known to terrorize his wealthier neighbors by driving his jeep across their lawns. After White’s death, his widow donated his papers, including diaries, to an electronic surveillance museum. As information on MK-ULTRA entered the public domain, people who had known White only in his official FBN capacity were stunned to learn of his undercover role as Morgan Hall.

Ike Feldman, kept alive by a pacemaker, lives with his wife in a quiet suburban Long Island community where he tends his garden and oversees a number of business interests. According to George Belk, a former head of the Drug Enforcement Agency in New York, Feldman quit the drug agency following a probe by the internal security division. “Feldman was the sort of guy who didn’t have too many scruples,” said Dan Casey, a retired FBN agent who worked with Feldman in San Francisco. “For him, the ends justified the means.” A DEA flack confirmed Feldman “resigned under a cloud” at a time when a number of agents came under suspicion for a variety of offenses, none having to do with secret drug-testing programs. Feldman asserts he still works for the CIA on a contract basis, mostly in the Far East and Korea.

On the day of our last interview, over lunch at a restaurant in Little Italy, Feldman told me the CIA had contacted him and asked him why he was talking to me.

“Fuck them,” Feldman said. “I do what I want. I never signed any goddamn secrecy agreement.”

I asked him why he decided to talk with me. “There’s too much bullshit in the world,” Feldman said. “The world runs on bullshit.

“To make a long story short,” he said, using one of his favorite verbal segues, “I want the truth of this to be known so that people understand that what we did was good for the country.”

We ambled down the street to a Chinese grocer, where Feldman carried on a lengthy conversation with the owner in Chinese. A couple of young girls, tourists, wanted to have their picture taken with Feldman. “Are you a gangster?” they asked.

“No,” Feldman replied with a wave of his cigar, “I’m a goddamn CIA agent.”

As we walked on, I asked Feldman to explain how his work had been helpful to the country.

“I learned that most of this stuff was necessary for the United States,” he said, “and even though it may have hurt somebody in the beginning, in the long run it was important. As long as it did good for the country.”

SCIENTIST WAS ‘KILLED TO STOP HIM REVEALING DEATH SECRETS’; SO DID CHENEY AND RUMSFELD COVER UP A CIA ASSASSINATION?

London Sunday Express

By Gordon ThomasAugust 25, 2002

US Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld have been sensationally accused of covering up the “murder” of a former army scientist.

In 1953, Frank Olson, a key member of the CIA’s brainwashing programme MKULTRA, “plunged” from a New York hotel window.

He had allegedly threatened to reveal the CIA involvement in “terminal experiments” in post-war Germany and in Korea during the Korean War.

For almost half a century, his son Eric, a psychologist, has insisted his father as murdered on orders from the highest level. Now, California history professor Kathryn Olmstead says she has found documents written by Cheney and Rumsfeld which show how far the White House went to conceal information about Olson’s death.

She says Olson made anthrax and other biological weapons and that part of his work had been at Britain’s Porton Down Research Centre.

Eric Olson believes that Cheney and Rumsfeld were later given the task in the 1970s of covering up the details of his father’s death.

At that time Rumsfeld was White House Chief of Staff to President Gerald Ford. Dick Cheney was a White House assistant.

Among the papers found by Professor Olmstead is one that allegedly states: “Dr Olson’s job was so sensitive that it is highly unlikely that we would submit relevant evidence.”

In a memo, Cheney allegedly acknowledges that: “The Olson lawyers will seek to explore all the circumstances of Dr Olson’s employment, as well as those concerning his death. In any trial, it may become apparent that we are concealing evidence for national security reasons and any settlement or judgement reached thereafter could be perceived as money paid to cover up the activities of the CIA.”

Frank Olson’s family received $ 750,000 (then about GBP 400,000) to settle their claims in 1976.

Both the offices of Rumsfeld and Cheney have declined to comment on their role concerning the alleged coverup but, from his home outside Washington, Eric Olson said that the documents involving Rumsfeld and Cheney show they “have questions to answer”.

He added: “The documents show the lengths to which the government was trying to cover up the truth.”

However, CIA spokesman Paul Nowack insisted: “The CIA fully cooperated in allowing the truth to surface. Tens of thousands of documents were released”.

Eric Olson said his father was murdered to cover up his ultra-secret research in Korea and Europe.

He said: “My father was among scientists studying the use of LSD and other drugs to enhance interrogations as Cold War tensions ran high.”

He contends that, in the final days of his life, his father became “morally distraught” over his work and decided to quit.

Mercury News reporter Frederick Tulksy said: “In 1993, Eric Olson arranged for his father’s body to be unearthed and examined by James Starrs, a forensic scientist. Starrs concluded that Frank Olson had probably been struck on the head and then thrown out of the hotel window.”

In late November 1953, Frank Olson, then 43, joined a group of government officials at a conference at Deep Creek Lodge in western Maryland. For days afterward, Olson was withdrawn. His son, Eric, says his father told his wife that he intended to quit his job.

Frank Olson did not quit. On November 23, he went to New York and visited LSD researcher Harold A Abramson.

Olson went back to New York on November 28 and checked into the Statler Hotel. He was scheduled to enter a sanitarium the next day.

Early in the morning of November 29, Frank Olson went through the window of the hotel room he was sharing with colleague Robert Lashbrook. Lashbrook told the police he was awakened by the sound of breaking glass.

In 1975, a commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller issued a report on CIA abuses, Days later, the family was invited to the White House to meet President Ford. He assured them they would be given all information about what happened to Frank Olson.

This week, the Olsons’ attorney David Rudovsky, of Philadelphia, said: “It now appears that was not the case.”

CLOSE

“Justice Delayed”

Final section of new Postscript to:Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans

by Jonathan MorenoProfessor of Biomedical Ethics, University of Virginia

In Chapter Seven I chronicled some of the outrageous activities of the national security agencies during the 1950s. Perhaps the most famous single case of CIA “mind control” experiments was that of Frank Olson, the scientist who has long been said to have committed suicide by jumping out of a New York City hotel room window after being given LSD without his knowledge. That, at least, is the story that the public has come to know and that is recounted in this book.

However, in the fall of 1999 the A&E cable television network aired a program that reiterated previously broadcast doubts about the official story and also offered the most comprehensive alternative theory yet presented. The program noted that the New York City district attorney’s office has reopened the 1953 case as a homicide investigation. The D.A. was partly influenced by the findings of a forensic pathologist from George Washington University who examined Olson’s remains and concluded that Olson suffered a blow on the head with a blunt object prior to his fall. Just as importantly, the pathologist did not find the facial lacerations that had been recorded by the coroner in 1953 (though the skin was intact upon exhumation of the remains), though cuts would have been expected from a violent thrust through glass. Others interviewed on the program disputed the likelihood of suicide from a closed window with the shade drawn, and in fact Olson has spoken calmly to his wife on the telephone a few hours before. But why would a quiet scientist like Frank Olson be murdered?

In the spring of 2000 Eric Olson, Frank Olson’s son, called me in my office at the University of Virginia. We talked about the standard account of his father’s death and he shared with me his theory, one that will be tested by the New York district attorney. According to Eric Olson, his father was eliminated because he posed a threat to the agency’s top secret drug experiments, including some that may have been conducted abroad. Frank Olson, it seems, was not only an experimental subject but also engaged as a researcher in the CIA’s Special Operations Division. As a researcher Olson himself used animals in experiments and perhaps witnessed the use of humans as well. Whatever he saw, perhaps in U.S.-occupied West Germany, seems to have greatly disturbed him. As it happens, Eric Olson told me, the CIA’s declassified assassination manual for 1953 specifies a faked suicidal jump as a preferred means of elimination.

I asked Eric Olson for the image that came to his mind after nearly five decades of life with one of the greatest burdens a person can have, the unsolved mystery of his father’s death. “I have long thought that accounts of my father’s death are very like H.C. Andersen’s story ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes,’ Olson said. “After the perceptual cloud is punctured and the emperor is seen to be stark naked one wonders how the illusion of fine garb could have been sustained so long.” Olson continued:

“Neither version of the story of my father’s ‘suicide’— neither the one from 1953 in which he ‘fell or jumped’ out a hotel room window for no reason, nor the 1975 version in which he dives through a closed window in a nine-day delayed LSD flashback while his hapless CIA escort either looks on in dismay or is suddenly awakened by the sound of crashing glass (both versions were peddled) — made any sense. On the other hand both versions deflected attention from the most troubling issue inherent in the conduct of the kind of BW and mind-control research in which my father and his colleagues were engaged.

“The moral of my father’s murder is that a post-Nuremberg world places the experimenters as well as the research subjects (my father was both simultaneously) at risk in a new way, particularly in countries that claim the moral high ground. Maintenance of absolute secrecy in the new ethical context implies that potential whistle blowers can neither be automatically discredited nor brought to trial for treason. Nor can casualties arising from experiments with unacknowledged weapons be publicly displayed. The only remaining option is some form of ‘disposal.’ This places the architects of such experiments in a position more like that of Mafia dons than traditional administrators of military research. The only organizational exit is a horizontal one. In the face of this implication the CIA enforcers of the early 1950’s did not flinch, though historians along with the general public have continued to see the state in all its finery.”

My conversations with Eric Olson were one of two experiences that brought his father’s case home and the CIA’s decades-old experiments home to me after Undue Risk was first published. A history devoted specifically to American biological weapons program, The Biology of Doom, also appeared for the first time in 1999. Its author, Ed Regis, is like me a former philosophy professor. Reading Regis’ book I learned that Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA spymaster responsible for their chemical warfare program, including the LSD experiments, died at the University of Virginia Hospital. His death occurred while I was putting the finishing touches on Undue Risk, and his deathbed was steps from my office in the medical school.

Later a second irony occurred to me. Gottlieb’s privacy was scrupulously protected by my physician colleagues, his doctors, as it should have been. They afforded him the moral consideration and human dignity that he seems not to have granted those who were unfortunate enough to be unwitting participants in his experiments. Yet I am more hopeful than ever that efforts to quash the truth about some of the most closely held secrets of cold war experiments, including the circumstances surrounding Frank Olson’s death, will ultimately fail. The only way to be sure is to demand that federal officials open the files on biological and chemical experiments, just as they did on radiation experiments. The New York district attorney’s handling of the Olson case can light the way for the rest of government, but only if all of us refuse to forget the victims of undue risk.

The Nation

December 20, 1999

PAUL ROBESON JR.The Paul Robeson Files

In the morning of March 27, 196 1, Paul Robeson was found in the bathroom of his Moscow hotel suite after having slashed his wrists with a razor blade following a wild party that had raged there the preceding night. His blood loss was not yet severe, and he recovered rapidly. However, both the raucous party and his “suicide attempt” remain unexplained, and for the past twenty years the US government has withheld documents that I believe hold the answer to the question: Was this a drug induced suicide attempt?

Heavily censored documents I have already received under the Freedom of Information Act confirm that my father was under intense surveillance by the FBI and the CIA in 1960 and 1961, because he was planning to visit China and Cuba, in violation of US passport restrictions. The FBI files also reveal a suspicious concern over my father’s health, beginning in 1955.

A meeting I had in 1998 adds further grounds for suspicion. In June of that year I met Dr. Eric Olson in New York, and we were both struck by the similarities between the cases of our respective fathers. On November 28, 1953, Olson’s father, Dr. Frank Olson, a scientist working with the CIA’s top-secret MK-ULTRA “mind control” program, allegedly “jumped” through the glass of a thirteenth-floor hotel window and fell to his death. CIA documents have confirmed that a week earlier Olson had been surreptitiously drugged with LSD at a high-level CIA meeting. It is expected that a New York grand jury will soon reveal whether it believes Olson was murdered by the CIA because of his qualms about the work he was doing. MK-ULTRA poisoned foreign and domestic “enemies” with LSD to induce mental breakdown and/ or suicide. Olson’s drugging suggested a CIA motive similar to the possible one in my father’s case—concern about the target’s planned course of action.

In this context, the fact that Richard Helms was CIA chief of operations at the time of my father’s 1961 “suicide attempt” has sinister implications. Helms was also responsible for the MK-ULTRA program. In 1967 a former CIA agent to whom I promised anonymity told me in a private conversation that my father was the subject of high-level concern and that Helms and Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles discussed him in a meeting in 1955.

The events leading to my father’s “suicide attempt” began when, alarmed by intense surveillance in London, he departed abruptly for Moscow alone. His intention was to visit Havana at Fidel Castro’s personal invitation and return home to join the civil rights movement. Since the date set by the CIA for the Bay of Pigs invasion fell only four weeks after his arrival in Moscow, the CIA had a strong motive for preventing his travel to Havana.

My father manifested no depressive symptoms at the time, and when my mother and I spoke to him in the hospital soon after his “suicide” attempt, he was lucid and able to recount his experience clearly. The party in his suite had been imposed on him under false pretenses, by people he knew but without the knowledge of his official hosts. By the time he realized this, his suite had been invaded by a variety of anti-Soviet people whose behavior had become so raucous that he locked himself in his bedroom. His description of that setting, I later came to learn, matched the conditions prescribed by the CIA for drugging an unsuspecting victim, and the physical psychological symptoms he experienced matched those of an LSD trip.

My Russian being fluent, I confirmed my father’s story by interviewing his official hosts, his doctors, the organizers of the party, several attendees and a top Soviet official. However, I could not determine whether my father’s blood tests had shown any trace of drugs, whether an official investigation was in progress or why his hosts were unaware of the party. The Soviet official confirmed that known “anti-Soviet people” had attended the party.

By the time I returned to New York in early June, my father appeared to me to be fully recovered. However, when my parents returned to London several weeks later, my father became anxious, and he and my mother returned to Moscow. There his wellbeing was again restored, and in September they once more went back to London, where my father almost immediately suffered a relapse. My mother, acting on the ill-considered advice of a close family friend, allowed a hastily recommended English physician to sign my father into the Priory psychiatric hospital near London.

My father’s records from the Priory, which I obtained only recently, raise the suspicion that he may have been subjected to the CIA’s MK-ULTRA “mind depatterning” technique, which combined massive electroconvulsive therapy with drug therapy. On the day of his admission, my mother was pressured into consenting to ECT, and the treatment began just thirty-six hours later. In May 1963 1 learned that my father had received fifty four ECT treatments, and I arranged his transfer to a clinic in East Berlin.

Certain key CIA documents that have been withheld, in whole or in part, would probably shed additional light on these events. Among the questions to be answered are:

§ Why was Robeson’s health such a concern to the government, and why is the FBI’s information on it still being withheld?

§ Was the CIA implicated in my father’s 1961 “suicide attempt”?

§ Did the CIA, in collusion with the British intelligence service, orchestrate his subjection to “mind depatterning”?

The idea that thirty-eight years after the original events occurred, the release of these documents could endanger national security should be rejected. On the contrary, the release of the information will improve national security by helping to protect the American people from criminal abuse by the intelligence agencies that are supposed to defend them.

CLOSE

THE CIA’S ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST

By Tad Szulc

What was in the minds of the men who for two decades pursued the dream of a mind-control drug? And how did they see the practical and ethical issues?

“LSD -25 is the most potent psychoagent available at the present time. Trace quantities of LSD-25 create serious mental confusion of the manic and schizophrenic type and render the mind temporarily susceptible to suggestion. … But there are as yet insufficient data to confirm or deny its usefulness for eliciting true and accurate statements from subjects under its influence. Because LSD-25 is colorless, odorless and tasteless, it could possibly be used clandestinely for the contamination of food and water, although the data on its stability in solution are conflicting. Since the effect of the drug is temporary in contrast to the fatal nerve agents, there are important strategic advantages for its use in certain operations…. Of the other known psychogenic drugs, mescaline produces reactions that are the most similar to those of LSD-25…. Although no Soviet data are available on LSD-25, it must be assumed that the scientists of the USSR are thoroughly cognizant of the strategic importance of this powerful drug and are capable of producing it at any time.”

For a change, the Central Intelligence Agency was onto something before most of the rest of the world had discovered it. The year was 1955 and the analysis was from a report of the agency’s Office of Scientific Intelligence titled “Strategic Medical Significance of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD-25).”

Some researchers had already begun to experiment with LSD on their own in those days, without any help from the CIA. But the drug cult of the 1960s was far in the future, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were only a couple of struggling young assistant professors. Supplies of the powerful hallucinogen were not even available on the U.S. market, and little was known about its effects on personality and behavior (see box, page 101). Indeed, it’s not unreasonable to speculate that the CIA-sponsored research with LSD during the 1950s in private institutions and hospitals contributed in some modest way to the drug culture-by turning many people on to the drug. As described in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Ken Kesey first took the drug in 1959 as an experimental subject at the Stanford University Medical School-one of the institutions recently notified by the CIA that it was a site for research associated with the mind-control program.

America’s intelligence chiefs were interested in some kind of “truth drug” as far back as 1943, when the wartime Office of Strategic Services ~OSS~ experimented with marijuana. But the CIA’s interest in drugs and behavioral research was, during the 1950s, awakened by reports that the Soviet Union had made giant strides in developing chemical compounds for brainwashing. Government officials had been impressed by the “confessions” of Hungary’s late Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty during his trial in 1949—CIA specialists were convinced he had been brainwashed with drugs—and with the apparent brainwashing of American prisoners of war in North Korea.

Bad trip: Artist’s portrayal of the suicide of biochemist Frank Olson, who jumped from a New York hotel room at 2:30 A.M. on November 28, 1953, nine days after the CIA gave him LSD. Foreground, Dr. Robert Lashbrook, the CIA scientist who brought Olson to New York to seek treatment. (Illustrations by Haruo Miyauchi)

Under the circumstances, the agency was fearful that its own agents could be brainwashed, and in 1950, it embarked on “defensive” research to find ways of protecting them. What CIA scientists eagerly sought at the outset was a drug that might neutralize the suspected Russian compounds and prevent agents from revealing information. Taking shape as it did in the early 1950s, when the Cold War was the central concern of U.S. foreign policy, the “defensive” research was expanded almost overnight to encompass “offensive” work as well-the testing and development of drugs such as LSD that the CIA could use for its interrogations of enemy personnel.

During almost a quarter of a century, the CIA conducted or sponsored at least 419 secret drug- testing projects. The ex-periments were part of a broader pro-gram that also explored other means ofmind and behavior control, such as hyp-nosis and even implantation of electrodes in the brain. Although the agency tested compounds ranging from mes-caline to extracts from poisonous mushrooms, the key drug was LSD-25, a synthetic variation on a c ompound found in a fungus. The tests were con-ducted at a cost of at least $25 million at 86 United States and Canadian hospi-tals, prisons, universities, and military installations, as well as the agency’s own “safe houses” in Washington, New York, and San Francisco.

The subjects of the test were, at first, largely CIA volunteers-and, indeed, some of the agency’s top scientists took LSD to see how it aff ected their intellectual faculties. But eventually the agency found other subjects among narcotics addicts under treatment, federal prisoners, terminal-cancer patients in charity wards, college students, and fun-seeking “johns” entrapped at $100 a head by CIA-controlled prostitutes. just how much they were all told about LSD before they were given the drug remains unclear, but, by the agency’s own admission, many were “unwitting” subjects. Although ethical standards for such experiments were considerably murkier then than they are now, the CIA launched its LSD research on unwitting subjects even though the U.S. was a party to an international understanding that, in effect, banned such activities. The understanding known as the Nuremberg Principles was approved by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1946-with the U.S. voting in favor-as a formal condemnation of war crimes that included the medical experiments performed by Nazi doctors on human prisoners.

“War room”: In the years of projects BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, the planners met in what was known as the war room. The program was the creation of gung-ho young operatives who later rose to top positions, among them Richard Helms (lower right), who became CIA director.

Before Richard Helms left his post as CIA director in 1973, a large portion of the agency’s records of its mindcontrol program was ordered destroyed But a good deal of the story is detailed in Congressional testimony and thousands of pages of documents released in recent months under the Freedom of Information Act. While the general outlines of the program are by now generally known, the documents-which include descriptions of the tests themselves, memos from top CIA officials tracing the evolution of the projects, evaluations of the results-provide an interesting, close-up look at just what the CIA wanted to find out and to accomplish, andhow a defensive program turned into an offensive one that used many innocent citizens as guinea pigs.

Most important, the story raises ethical questions that are important today. One-fourth of the American scientists who were approached by the CIA agreed to work for it, according to one of the agency’s documents. While some were no doubt pursuing harmless research, others were working on projects that Could have been used for manipulative purposes, with top-secret security clearances and under the cover of “pure medical research.” What does their complicity tell us about the ethical standards of American scientists?

The Birth of BLUEBIRD
The man whom the CIA documents credit with inspiring the program is Dr. L. Wilson Greene of the Army Chemical Corps, who had long urged the United States to embark upon psychochemical warfare. The basic program, called BLUEBIRD,and soon renamed ARTICHOKE (the code names have no known significance), was the creation of a small group of young, gung-ho CIA operators, former members of the OSS, whom time rose to key positions in the, agency. One of these was Richard Helms, then special assistant for clandestine operations to CIA director Walter Bedell Smith. Another was James Angleton, then chief of the agency’s “Staff A,” the forerunner of the Counterintelligence Staff that he ran until his forced retirement in 1974.Among CIA officials with a scientific background present at the birth of BLUEBIRD were Dr. Marshall Chadwell, assistant director for scientific intelligence, Colonel James H. Drum, deputy chief of the Technical Services Staff, and Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a biochemist who was to become th e central figure in all the subsequent CIA mind- and-behavior-modifi cation endeavors.

Established by the CIA on April 2, 1951, Project BLUEBIRD Was supposed to invent techniques for what became known as “special interrogations.” By mid-year, however, BLUEBIRD had begun to spread its wings. A document issued on June 11 described the essential elements in the program as “physiological research leading to a better understanding of the constituent factors in human behavior” and “physiological and pharmacological research leading to a better understanding of the action or effectiveness of various agents used in connection with efforts to control human behavior.”

Soon a list of 37 “physiological agents” was drawn up for possible use in interrogations. It ranged from amphetamines and cocaine, to cannabis, mescaline, morphine, pentobarbital, and scopolamine. Although lysergic acid had been discovered in 1938, and the effects of LSD on the mind were first observed in 1943, the CIA seemed unaware of it in 1951: it did not make the BLUEBIRD list.

Shortly thereafter, however, BLUEBIRD acquired a new aim: a memo on the program’s goals from Dr. Sidney Gottlieb spoke vaguely about the possibilities of “inducing a person to perform acts (short or long term) which he normally could not be expected to perform.” The CIA had begun to think seriously about behavior control,

BLUEBIRD became ARTICHOKE on August 20,1951, and a few months later an internal memo of the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence suggested a more specific aim for the program. At this point, the agency seemed to be looking for a method of inducing amnesia in persons from whom information had been obtained under the effect of special drugs or hypnotism. The idea was that foreign agents should never remember that they had talked to CIA interrogators. “It remains the dream of the interested agencies,” the memo of January 25, 1952, said, “that a drug is forthcoming that can be given to a person orall , without his knowledge, that will result in his revealing anything the interested party would like to know, and the person would have complete amnesia for the event.”

In the same report, the agency expressed interest in hypnotism as a related tool, observing that “there is ample evidence that unethical actions can be accomplished through the use of hypnosis in our controlled situations.” It recommended the recruitment of a New York hypnotist who “tends toward unscrupulous use of this technique.” It declared that “it has been proven… that a hypnotized person can be made to lie to the polygraph through direct hypnotic control or through posthypnotic suggestion,” (Most professionals experienced in hypnotism would deny there is any evidence it has these powers.)

The report also complained that the CIA Security Office was being too strict with ARTICHOKE operators, denying, for example, the permission to use federal prisoners for their experiments on the grounds that “criticism of the government interest in such activities might, if discovered, result in irreparable political repercussions.”

In February, the new coordinator of ARTICHOKE, Dr. Marshall Chadwell, proposed the establishment of “an integrated CIA program for the development of special interrogations or other techniques for the purpose of controlling an individual without his knowledge.” CIA director Smith accepted Dr. Chadwell’s proposal, and a month later, the CIA set up a “small testing facility” at its downtown headquarters in Washington, D.C. Sometime in 1952, the agency began testing LSD on individuals, presumably CIA volunteers. But a new ARTICHOKE report was not promising as far as LSD was concerned. It noted that “while definite results have been achieved in producing confusion among subjects treated with minute quantities, these items have not yet shown usefulness for interrogation purposes.”

LSD was not yet ready for testing in interrogations, but the agency did report some success in causing amnesia after interrogations, through a combination of hypnosis and sodium pentathol. In June, ARTICHOKE dispatched a team to West Germany to test new interrogation methods on two Soviet intelligence agents suspected of “being doubled,” that is, pretending to defect while actually working for the KGB. The two agents, who claimed to be working for the West, were examined under a “psychiatric-medical cover” that is, they were given a trumped-up excuse for the interrogations.

With medication and hypnosis, one agent was put in a trance that he held for about One hour and 40 minutes; subsequently, the documents say, total amnesia was produced by posthypnotic suggestion. The second agent went into a deep hypnotic trance with only light medication and was interrogated for well over an hour. The ARTICHOKE report says only a partial amnesia was achieved. But in a second test on the agent, in which “the ARTICHOKE technique of using straight medication” was employed, the agency obtained highly successful results during a two-hour and-15-minute interrogation which included a “remarkable regression.” During this regression, the subject evidently relived certain events in his life, some dating back 15 years, while totally accepting the case officer and interpreter “as an old, trusted and beloved personal friend whom the subject had known in years past in Georgia, USSR.” The report goes on to say that total amnesia was apparently achieved for the second test. (It does not disclose whether the CIA ever learned if the two Russians were double agents or not.)

The drugs used in the interrogation were sodium pentathol alone, or sodium pentathol together with Desoxyn, a stimulant. The team reported that the tests “demonstrated conclusively the effectiveness of the combined chemical-hypnotic technique” Now the way was opened for the use of LSD in interrogations.

MK-ULTRA-A Turning Point

Meanwhile, a CIA scientist, working under deep cover, had returned from a trip to Europe in July 1952 with a recommendation that the drug be employed in chemical warfare against entire populations. The scientist wrote that “our own current work contains the strong suggestion that LSD-25 will produce mass hysteria (unaccountable laughter, anxiety, eth.). While our studies so far have been carried out in isolated individuals, one at a time, it is well known that hysteria is compounded when several vulnerable individuals are together. The lysergic-acid derivative can produce a temporary state of severe imbalance, hysteria, insanity…. Conceivably, this might be an unusually merciful agent of warfare: temporarily nullifying the individual’s effectiveness, but not permanently damaging him.”

With all this in mind, the CIA decided to broaden ARTICHOKE. A memorandum circulated in September 1952 announced that the scope of the project was “research and testing to arrive at, means of control rather than the more limited concept embodied in ‘special interrogations.”’ At a subsequent meeting of the ARTICHOKE steering committee, much time was taken up with discussions of LSD and on the possibility of concentrating on “certain facilities in the United States as testing grounds for new ideas, experiments, etc., particularly using criminals and the criminally insane.”

But the great turning point in the history of the CIA program came in April 1953 with the launching of the equally top-secret Project MK-ULTRA, which was apparently intended as a parallel funding mechanism for ARTICHOKE. In its subsequent attempts at reconstructing All these events, the agency was unable to explain why exactly MK-ULTRA was created; it became completely intertwined with ARTICHOKE, although it very quickly came up with some very extraordinary ideas of its own.

The guiding force behind MK-ULTRA was Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who had just become chief of the Chemical Division of the CIA’s Technical Services Staff. Remembered by his colleagues for his forcefulness as well as for his marked stuttering while excited, Gottlieb came closest to the image of the sinister scientist in the whole strange cast of agency characters. He played this role for 20 years, until his forced resignation and a two-year disappearance in Australia after CIA scandals began breaking out in 1973.

The bespectacled researcher was a passionate believer in psychochemical warfare and dedicated his time to LSD testing, highly sophisticated experiments in hypnosis, and the search for hallucinatory materials in exotic mushrooms and flowers. When the agency plotted the assassination of Congo leftist Patrice Lumumba in 1960, it was Gottlieb who personally carried the poison to the Congo and hand-delivered it to the agency’s chief of station.

No sooner had MK-ULTRA been established than Gottlieb proceeded to organize 13 subprojects that called for the support of LSD research for the purposes of disturbance of memory, discrediting by aberrant behavior, altering sex patterns, eliciting information, enhancing suggestibility, and creating dependence. He ordered the preparation of an operational field manual on the uses of LSD. He personally handled contracts with outside institutions, approving every payment, no matter how small.

He even recruited a well-known New York magician, the late John Mulholland, to prepare a top-secret manual on techniques for surreptitiously slipping LSD and other drugs into the drinks of unsuspecting persons. The idea occurred to Gottlieb after his field agents reported difficulties in handling LSD without detection. He agreed to pay Mulholland $3,000 for his efforts, and was greatly pleased with his discovery of the magician. But while Mulholland prepared a detailed memo on what the manual would cover, there’s no evidence in the CIA documents that he ever turned it in.

Sleight of hand: When its field agents reported problems in handling LSD for secret tests, the CIA hired a New York magician, John Mulholland, for advice on how to I . improve their skills, He was to prepare a manual of tricks for slipping drugs into the drinks of unsuspecting test subjects.

Another Gottlieb subproject under MK-ULTRA conducted experiments with LAE, a lysergic-acid derivative, for the purpose of inducing depersonalization and a schizophrenia-like condition in test subjects. Gottlieb referred to the result in these cases as “reversible chemical lobotomy”—suggesting that the effects wear off. There were 429 tests of this type reported on normal and psychotic individuals in the first year of MK-ULTRA. (As in other such tests mentioned in the CIA documents, there was no indication of where the test subjects came from and whether they were “witting” or “unwitting.”) Still another MKULTRA subproject called for a psychological analysis of the effects of LSD on 220 college students who were tested in 1953.

Only one problem seemed to slow down Gottlieb’s ambitious drug experiments: the agency couldn’t get enough LSD. The drug was manufactured only by the Sandoz company in Switzerland. The CIA was able to secretly buy small amounts from Sandoz, but this was not considered sufficient. The agency kept worrying, moreover, that the Swiss were also exporting the drug to the Sovier Union.

Gottlieb therefore set up another subproject to search for new supplies of LSD and other rare drugs in theU.S. and abroad. A Gottlieb memo in 1953 stated that MK-ULTRA Subproject 6 “is designed to develop a reliable source of lysergic acid derivatives within the U.S., as opposed to our present complete depen upon [DELETED I sources, and in addition, it aims to extend the isolation and testing program of the hypnoti c nat- products from the Rivea species of plants obtained from [DELETED].”

Gottlieb failed to explain it in his memo, but seeds of the Rivea plant (its full name is Rivea corymbosa), when ingested in quantity, produce nausea, digestive upset, hallucinations, loss of motor control, and, finally, coma. He obviously knew, however, that lysergic acid monoethylamide can be isolated from Rivea seeds and turned into LSD.

CIA “Guinea Pigs”

While Gottlieb was looking for better sources of LSD, the CIA’s ARTICHOKE committee developed concern that for-agency personnel might, Lill &I t h e influence of drugs, reveal top-secret information to outsiders. According to the minutes of a committee meeting held in July 1953, one of the participants stated that “some individuals in the Agency had to know tremendous amounts of information and if any way could be found to produce amnesias for this type of information-for instance, after the individual had left the Agency-it would be a remarkable thing.”

The speaker then stated that “the need for amnesias was particularly great in operations work.” He was assured by two of his colleagues that work was continually being done in an effort to produce controlled amnesias by various means.

One series of tests on CIA employees was designed to see whether LSD could i break the so-called “pentathol block.” During interrogations, captured agents were often given sodium pentathol-or “truth serum” sometimes combined with hypnosis, as in the case of the Soviet “double agents,” in an effort to get them to disclose secrets. But intelligence services discovered that they could “condition” their agents against revealing information under the influence of the drug by giving them doses of it themselves.

A former CIA official reported in an interview that he was given LSD 21 times for this purpose at one of the agency’s cover facilities in Washington. Tic was never given a psychiatri c examination, and after the last test, he suffered within 24 hours what he described as an LSD “relapse,” Driving his car i that day, he experienced a major “loss of coherence.” He lost all control and found himself in the wreckage of the vehicle after it turned over several times on a Washington parkway.

But the greatest shock in these LSD experiments came when the CIA learned that one of its subjects committed suicide nine days after ingesting the drug. The victim was Dr. Frank R. Olson, a 43-year-old civilian biochemist employed by the Army Medical Corps a tFort Detrick, Maryland. According to a report by Colonel Sheffield Edwards Olson had participated in an LSD-test’ ing session on the evening of November 19, 1953. Also present were Gottlieb, 1 two CIA scientists-a man named Hughes and Dr. Robert V. Lashbrook and four members of the Army’s Chemi cal Corps Special Operations team.

Gottlieb and Lashbrook took the drug thernselves. Colonel Edwards reported that the men had assembled at a twostory log cabin in the Deer Creek Lake area of Fort Detrick. He wrote that “on Thursday evening, it was decided to experiment with the drug LSD, and for the members present to administer the drug to themselves to ascertain the effect a clandestine application would have on a meeting or conference.” The report asserted that “Gottlieb stated a ‘very small dose’ of LSD was placed in a bottle of Cointreau,” and that afterward the group was “boisterous and laughing, and they could not continue the meeting or engage in sensible conversation.”

Olson was told that he had swallowed LSD about 20 minutes after drinking some Cointreau. He killed himself nine days later by jumping out the window of New York’s Starlet Hotel at 2:30 A.M. on Saturday, November 28. He had been brought to New York by Lashbrook to be treated for an alleged psychiatric disturbance by the CIA’s principal secret LSD consultant, Dr. Harold A. Abramson, a highly respected physician who was then head of the Allergy Clinic at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York.

It remains unclear why Olson was the only one to be seriously affected by the LSD dose. Subsequent CIA memos claimed that he had previously suffered from “suicidal tendencies” and that LSD had simply triggered his suicide. Colonel Edwards reported that “Gottlieb reiterated many times that outside of the boisterous effect and the inability to think properly, LSD has no harmful or permanently injurious effects.”

Outside Contractors

None of the men in the log cabin had undergone medical or psychiatric examinations before taking the drug, and Gottlieb was reprimanded by the new ClA director, Allen Dulles, for failure to take precautions. For a while, indeed, it looked as if the CIA flirtation with LSD was over. According to an official reI port, Gottlieb’s immediate supervisor, Dr. Willis Gibbons, chief of the Technical Services Staff, had impounded all LSD material at CIA headquarters and locked it in a safe next to his own desk. The report added that “Dr. Gibbons stated that he is stopping any LSD tests which may have been instituted under CIA auspices.”

Although all outside contractors I were to be notified of Gibbons’ ban, the testing nonetheless went on. This was particularly true at the Addiction Research Center at the U.S. Public Health Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, whose director, Dr. Harris Isbell, had been experimenting with LSD on federal prisoners and his patients, with secret CIA sponsorship, for nearly two years before Olson died.

Dr. Isbell was among the group of distinguished American scientists who had enthusiastically embarked on studies under CIA contracts. His principal responsibilities had been research to find a synthetic substitute for codeine (the government feared the U.S. might be cut off from all its usual sources of opium). But Dr. Isbell’s report for the first quarter of 1954 noted that clinical studies at his center were also concerned with “intoxication with diethylamide of lysergic acid.” In his quarterly report to the CIA, he claimed new insights, including an evaluation of whether the drug’s effects varied according to race, age, and social and economic status: “We have now studied the subjective changes induced by LSD-25 in more than 50 former narcotic addicts. The symptoms observed appear to be identical with those observed in groups of non-addicts or for different composition with respect to race, age, social and economic status, and personality types…. The effects of LSD-25 appear to be specific and are not related to any of the factors mentioned above. This is a matter of great interest, since the subjective effects induced by LSD-25 have been studied more intensively and more thoroughly in a greater diversity of populations than any other drug with which we are familiar, including morphine and alcohol.”

LSD, it appears from CIA documents, was also given at about the same time to cancer patients and diabetics at a Washington hospital under an agency contract. This was one of Gottlieb’s MK-ULTRA subprojects and it was concerned with “toxic delirium, uremic coma and cerebral toxicity from poisoning.” Cancer and diabetic patients were given “chemical compounds” in order to “study the eff ect on mental function of large doses of the compound.” The document, which has heavy deletions, does not specifically mention LSD as the drug in these tests, but a former CIA official familiar with this particular program said privately that “it couldn’t have been anything else.”

Of course, we do not know if LSD had adverse effects on these patients; indeed, some dying patients today take LSD voluntarily, to experience the powerful visions that it stimulates in their final days. No doubt, Isbell’s prisoners and addicts were “volunteers,” but the documents do not tell us anything about what they were told before the experiments and whether they were given psychiatric examinations. Isbell has not made himself available for questioning on these and other points.

LSD Breakthrough

Whatever restraints on LSD tests had been imposed by the Olson death seem to have been abandoned when the agency received the electrifying news, in October 1954, that Eli Lilly & Company had succeeded in synthesizing the drug in its laboratories. This was the breakthrough the agency had been awaiting for three years; now it had access to all the LSD money could buy.

It was judged to be so important that a special memorandum on the subject was rushed to CIA director Dulles on October 26. The CIA clandestine services had immediately concluded that now LSD could be employed not only in testing but also in actual intelligence operations, for reasons given in the memo to Dulles: “Hitherto, LSD could not be considered seriously as a candidate Chemical Warfare agent for overt use. This was due to two factors: a) until recently only volatile liquids could be disseminated in a suitable fashion in bulk. LSD is a solid. LSD can now be produced in quantity and recent technical developments make it possible to disseminate solids in an effective manner.”

At this point, the matter was considered so important that the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence prepared its bulky top-secret study, “Strategic Medical Significance of Lysergic Acid Diethylamidc (LSD-25),” which was circulated to only seven senior officials besides Dulles. The study offered the best rationale to date for tests on humans. The drug had important strategic advantages. It was assumed that Russian scientists were aware of it. National security might be at stake.

As far back as April 1953, for example, a special CIA committee running the secret drug program had requested a “large number of bodies” for testing mind-affecting compounds, expressing the belief that a great many American scientists would be willing and anxious to carry out the experiments. In 1955, the CIA concluded that tests in a controlled environment-at the agency and in hospitals and prisons-were no longer sufficient, and, to make sense, they had to be conducted in “normal social situations.”

All along, Gottlieb had been trying to persuade his CIA superiors that experiments on unwitting subjects were necessary. He explained it thus: “One of the difficulties of determining explicitly the effect of the drug itself is that the subject and the observer are both conscious of the fact that an experiment is being performed. It is hoped in the next year that subjects… who are essentially normal from a psychiatric point of view will be given unwitting doses of the drug…. In this way more valuable experiments will probably be carried out in spite of hospital conditions. Attempts are being made at present to set up projects with collaborating organizations on the effect of LSD-25 on brain metabolism, on the metabolic activities of nerves and on enzyme reactions.”

The CIA had learned a great deal about LSD during its first four years of experiments, but it was also aware of wide gaps in its knowledge. After reading the strategic study, therefore, CIA director Dulles said in a 1955 memo to the secretary of defense that “it would appear to be important that field trials be made to determine the effects on groups of people or on individuals engaged in group activities.” This was the official green light for the CIA’s indiscriminate testing of LSD on unsuspecting Americans, and from 1955 onward, there’s evidence that more Such subjects were involved as the CIA kept expanding its quest for a dream drug without interference by agency directors or Presidents.

Ethical Issues

The drug programs were phased out in 1967 during the Johnson administration, but some projects were continued until 1973, when the new director, James R. Schlesinger, canceled a large number of questionable operations. What, then, had the CIA accomplished?

A 1975 report by the CIA’s inspectorgeneral summed it up: “The program had explored avenues of control of human behavior involving such subjects as radiation, electroshock, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and anthropology, harassment substances, and paramilitary devices and materials. … The TSD [Technical Services Division of the CIA] doctrine was described as being to the effect that testing of materials under accepted scientific procedures does not disclose the full pattern of reactions that may occur in operational situations, leading to TSD’s initiating a program in 1955 of covert testing of materials on unwitting U.S. citizens …. In a number of instances the test subject became ill for hours or days, including hospitalization in at least one case. While evaluations indicated some operational value in the tests, it was noted that scientific controls were ab-in addition to the basic ethical problem.”

Here, then, is the CIA’s own admission of failure. In 25 years of research into controlling human behavior, the agency had found little of value to its operations. But the report is also a selfindictment on moral and ethical grounds. And, by extension, it is an indictment of those scientists and academic and medical institutions who joined in these experiments in the name of a strange perception of national security.

To be sure, men such as Dr. Isbell of the Addiction Research Center were perhaps looking only for funding f or their work and might have opposed its use for mind control. “From my reading of the documents, it sounds as if Isbell’s research could just as easily have been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health,” says Dr. Sidney Cohen of UCLA, a respected LSD researcher. “The only thing Isbell was ‘guilty’ of was getting money from the CIA.”

It is true that the climate of the times was different. “Before World War 11, few medical researchers seemed consciously concerned with ethical problems,” says Dr. Richard Restak, a neurologist who writes about bioethical problems. “But with the postwar revelations of Nazi atrocities in the name of science, the need for formal ethical guidelines became painfully clear, The Nuremberg code was the most important document of this period. Still, the 1950s were a period of transition, and the Nuremberg Principles may have seemed to apply more directly to medical procedures than to behavioral research. It is only in the last decade or so that formal codes of ethics have become widely accepted in the psychiatric community.”

The number of scientists who de to participate in the CIA prograrn suggests the agency must have known from the start that its program would be viewed as shocking in many academic quarters. In fact, a former CIA staff psychiatrist, now in private practice in Arlington, Virginia, says that he had warned his agency colleagues at the inception of the LSD program that in his opinion, it was a “useless and dangerous pursuit.” He himself refused to be drawn into it.

Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a professor of psychiatry at Yale and an expert on brainwashing, takes the view that the CIA’s mind-control experiments were “the product of a lurid imagination,” leading to “destructive processes in the name of science.” Dr. Lifton, whom the CIA tried unsuccessfully to recruit in the early 1960s to work on the psychological breakdown of captured enemy guerrillas, said that all these events showed “how our profession can be drawn into corruption.” Quite aside from the moral issues, Lifton believes that the CIA research was not a serious professional effort, for it lacked the nccessary scientific standards. Carried out as a secret operation, Lifton points out, this work was deprived of exposure and critical evaluation by others.

He also believes that it was a violation of the Nuremberg Principles. It remains unclear, however, whether in the strictest legal sense the CIA was guilty of violating international law by conducting its mind-control tests. But whether the Nuremberg Principles were binding or not on the U.S., many Americans would consider the research dangerous from both an ethical and political viewpoint. Most frightening is the prospect that unless such research is strictly controlled, a government with vast powers could one day use it to manipulate its own citizenry. Recent experience strongly suggests, moreover, that such top-secret work fosters ever more lurid schemes. As one former CIA doctor put it: “We lived in a nevernever land of ‘eyes-only’ memos and unceasing experimentation.”

The final report of Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee on intelligence in 1976 summed it LIP this way: “The research and development program, and particularly the covert testing program, resulted in massive abridgements of the rights of American citizens, sometimes with tragic conscquences. The deaths of two Americans can be attributed to these programs; other participants in the testing program may still suffer from the residual effects.”*

Most of the men who conceived and directed the CIA’s rnind-control program are dead. The one scientist who probably knows the full history, Sidney Gottlieb, revealed little in an appearance before Senator Edward Kennedy’s Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research in September. Gottlieb testified in a private session with the senators because of ill health (his voice was piped via loudspeakers to reporters in another room) and under a grant of immunity from prosecution.

Gottlieb said that the CIA in the 1950s knew of “well-documented instances of covert drug administration against Americans.” Only from 20 to 50 Americans were unknowing subjects of drug tests at CIA safe houses in New York and San Francisco; “Harsh as it may seem in retrospect,” he said, “such a procedure and such a risk” were believed reasonable in view of the threat to “national survival.” The whitehaired witness admitted he had destroyed the records of these experi en ts. Gottlieb’s appearance, moreover, revealed little about the standards and procedures used in experiments by the CIAs private contractors.

We may never know the full truth about projects ARTICHOKE and MK-ULTRA, and, if we do, it probably won’t come from Gottlieb. As he discovered himself-along with the CIA-it is not easy to unlock men’s minds and wrest the secrets from them.

Tad Szulc is a Washington-based writer on national security matters. He is a former foreign correspondent of the New York Times and also covered the CIA in Washington for the Times. His books include one on E. Howard Hunt, Jr., Compulsive Spy (Viking), and a study of Nixon’s foreign policy to appear in January, The Illusion of Peace (Viking)

LSD: YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW

LSD-25 was the 25th in a series of compounds derived from the rye fungus ergot in routine research at Switzerland’s Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratories. In 1943, five years after it was synthesized, Dr. Albert Hofmann, one of the codiscoverers, accidentally became aware of its odd effects on the human brain. In his account of history’s first acid trip, Dr. Hofmann wrote, “My field of vision swayed before me like the reflections in an amusement-park mirror. Occasionally, I felt as if I were out of my body.”

When other-people who ingested the drug reported similar effects, the chemical became something of a pharmaceutical curiosity: a mysterious drug searching for something to cure. Because of the resemblance between an LSD trip and psychosis, much of the early research was focused on mental illness. Wholesale experimentation with the drug was launched in the early 1950s. Neurotics, psychotics, depressives, alcoholics, epileptics, and even terminal-cancer patients were given LSD.

LSD never did find a disease to cure. But, by 1965, about 2,000 studies of the drug had been published: Conservative estimates suggest that over 30,000 psychiatric patients and several thousand normal volunteers had been given LSD during this period.

Around 1954, Eli Lilly & Company published the details of a new process they had developed for synthesizing lysergic acid (the parent molecule of the ergot alkaloids) cheaply and in bulk. The immediate effect of this breakthrough was to keep down the price of ergot alkaloids, which tip to then had been distributed only by Sandoz. But there were other unanticipated results as well. Vast quantities of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, could now be produced with reasonable ease in any sophisticated chemistry laboratory.At about the same time, a subculture of researchers began to experiment on themselves. Some wanted to experience madness firsthand; others sought a mystical union with the beyond. Harvard psychologists Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were discovered by the media in 1962, and the craze was on. Only researchers had access to LSD through legitimate channels, but when publicity created a demand for LSD, hip chemists rushed to create a supply. An enterprising Californian called Owsley, for example, is said to have produced more than a million doses of LSD over the next few years. (At 25 micrograms per dose, a million doses of LSD would weigh only nine ounces.) Owsley acid became world famous for its high quality. But when Owsley’s factory in Berkeley, California, was raided in February 1965, the case was thrown out of court since California law did not specifically regulate LSD.

This oversight was soon to be corrected. As the numbers of people using LSD multiplied, so did sensationalized accounts of its effects. Alarmed by these horror stories, federal and state authorities moved to ban the drug. California passed its anti-LSD laws in October 1966. By the end of the 1960s, LSD was illegal. But, by 1973, according to the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, almost 5 percent of adult Americans had tried LSD or a similar hallucinogen at least once.

It is now clear that, tinder controlled conditions, LSD is a relatively harmless drug. In 1960, UCLA psychiatrist Sidney Cohen reviewed studies of 5,000 persons who had taken LSD a total of 25,000 times. He reported that for every 1,000 persons taking LSD under medical supervision, there were 0.8 psychotic reactions lasting more than a day, and no attempted or com suicides. These figures compare quite favorably with Cohen’s estimates for patients in psychotherapy: 1.8 psychotic episodes per thousand patients, and 1.2 attempted suicides and 0.4 completed suicides per thousand.

Thus, psychotic episodes, attempted suicide, and actual suicide were more common among psychotherapy patients than among persons taking LSD under medical supervision. This is particularly impressive since so many LSD recipients actually received the drug in psychotherapy.

A similar survey in 1969 by Dr. Nicholas Malleson of 4,303 British patients who had taken a total of more than 50,000 doses of LSD came to much the same conclusion. Interestingly, the Malleson study also noted that those physicians who had the greatest experience with LSD therapy were least likely to observe adverse reactions. That is, the patients of inexperienced LSD therapists were more likely to have bad trips. These data stress the point that LSD is safe only when it is taken under adequate medical supervision. The personality of the LSD user, his expectations for the experience, the setting in which the drug is consumed-all are factors in the complicated equation that determines LSD’s effects.

According to the most recent surveys of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, LSD still has a following. As large a percentage of the population took the drug in 1976 as in 1972. Dr. loan Rittenhouse, supervisory research psychologist at the National Institute, believes that LSD’s failure to achieve wider popularity stems from newspaper reports that the drug produces chromosome damage. Although the belief that LSD causes birth defects is quite controversial in scientific circles, it seems to be widely accepted by the public.

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 4, 1977 – He was a “rock-em, sock-em cop not overly carried away with playing spook,” according to a friend who knew him at the time. But the diaries and personal papers of the Central Intelligence Agency operative who ran “safe houses” in San Francisco and New York in which drug-addicted prostitutes gave LSD and other drugs to unsuspecting visitors tell a different story.

The diaries were kept by Col. George H. White, Alias Morgan Hall, a colorful federal narcotics agent and CIA “consultant” who died two years ago. They reveal new details, including names and dates, about the safe house project, dubbed “Operation Midnight Climax,” which was part of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program in the 1950s and 1960s to manipulate human behavior. Curiously, White’s widow donated his papers to the Electronics Museum at Foothill Junior College, a two-year school set amidst the rolling Los Altes hills 40 miles south of San Francisco. The papers are a rare find for anyone interested in the espionage business and show White dashing about the world, busting up narcotics rings in South America, Texas and San Francisco’s Chinatown.

They also provide documentary evidence that White met to discuss drugs and safe houses with such CIA luminaries as Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, head of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Division and the man who ran MK-ULTRA, and Dr. Robert V. Lashbrook, a CIA chemist who worked with LSD. Other high-ranking CIA officials mentioned prominently include Jame Angleton, C. P. Cabell and Stanley Lovell. Gottleib and Lashbrook have been subpoenaed to testify Sept. 20 before a Senate subcommittee investigating the MK-ULTRA project.

“Gottlieb proposes I be CIA consultant and I agree.” White wrote in his diary June 9, 1952. A year later it was confirmed: “CIA – got final clearance and sign contract as ‘consultant’ – met Gottlieb . . . lunch Napeleon’s – met Anslinger.”

Harry C. Anslinger was White’s boss and the No. 1 man in the Federal Bureau fo Narcotics. It could not be learned from the diaries whether Anslinger knew that one of his top narcotics agents also was working for the CIA, in fact, was tape-recording and observing men to whom prostitutes gave drugs after picking them up in bars. But a July 20, 1953, entry by White strongly suggests Anslinger knew: “Arrive Wash. – confer Anslinger and Gottlieb re CIA reimbursement for 3 men’s services.”

These entries fit in with a 1963 internal report by then-CIA Inspector General Lyman B. Kirkpatrick about the MK-ULTRA project. That report, made public in 1975, discussed the safe house operations and the connection to the Bureau of Narcotics:

“TSD (Technical Services Division) entered into an informal arrangement with certain cleared and witting individuals in the Bureau of Narcotics in 1955 which provided for the release of MK-ULTRA materials for such testing as those individuals deemed desirable and feasible.”
The report added that while “covert testing” was being transferred to the bureau, its chief would disclaim any knowledge of it.

“The effectiveness of the substances on individuals at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign,” Kirkpatrick wrote, “is of great significance, and testing has been performed on a variety of individuals within these categories.”

In 1953, White rented a house at 81 Bedford St. in New York City’s Greenwich Village under the name of Morgan Hall, the same one he used serveral years later to set up the Telegraph Hill apartment at 225 Chestnut St. in San Francisco.

His diaries show that Gottlieb and Lashbrook met him at the Bedford Street apartment. A June 8, 1953, entry said: “Gottlieb brings $4,123.27 for ‘Hall’ – Deposit $3,400.” A Sept. 16 entry added: “Lashbrook at 81 Bedford – Owen Winkle and LSD surprise – can wash.”

In 1955, White moved the safe house to San Francisco, and he took over as regional head of tha Bueau of Narcotics. Apparently, the Chestnut Street duplex also was used by the bureau to lure narcotics dealers and then arrest them. In 1956, White and narcotics agent Ira C. Feldman, who posed as an East Cost mobster, arrested seven San. Franciscans as part of a heroin ring.

Leo Jones, a friend of White, owned the company that installed the bugging equipment at the apartment. The equipment included four DD4 microphones disguised as wall outlets. These were hooked up to two model F-301 tape recorders monitored by agents in a “listening post” adjacent to the apartment. Jones also sold White a “portable toilet for observation post.”

It was an L-shaped apartment with a beautiful view of San Francisco Bay, and White, who kept pitchers of chilled martinis in the refrigerator, also had photos of manacled women being tortured and whipped.

“We were contacted by George White,” Jones said in an interview. “It was a combined project of the CIA and Bureau of Narcotics . . . It was always referred to as the pad, never the apartment, and was modeled after Playboy magazine, 1955 . . . I heard about prostitutes. Feldman had acquired three or four to set himself up with cover.”

White’s diaries indicate that Gottlieb continued to visit, flying out from Washington several times a year at least until 1961. Another visitor was John Gittinger, a CIA psychologist who testified last month before Senate investigative committees that he met with “Morgan Hall” on numerous occasions to interview prostitutes about their drug and sex habits.

White retired from the bureau in 1965 and became the fire marshal at Stinson Beach, a resort area in Marin County, north of San Francisco. Among his papers is a Sept. 30, 1970, letter to Dr. Harvey Powelson, then chief of the department of psychiatry at the University of California at Berkeley. He told Powelson that he had worked for a “rather obscure department of the government (that would like to remain obscure).”

That obscure department. White wrote, “was then interested in obtaining some factual information and data on the use and effect of various hallucinogens, including marijuana tetrahydrocannabinol and the then brandnew LSD. Tests were made under both clinical and nonclinical conditions on both witting and unwitting subjects.”

White said in the letter to Powelson he was interested enough to try the drugs himself. “So far as I was concerned, ‘clear thinking’ was nonexistent while under the influence of any of these drugs,” he wrote. “I did feel at times that I was having a ‘mind-expanding experience,’ but this vanished like a dream immediately after the session.” He said the tests were observed by psychiatrists, psychologists and pharmacologists.

Not all of White’s diary entries involved clandestine meetings with narcoties or CIA agents – or addicts and prostitutes, for that matter. He duly recorded that Eisenhower and Nixon won in 1952 and that the Brooklyn Dodgers took the National League baseball pennant in 1955.

And when his pet bird died, it hurt, he wrote. “Poor little bastard just couldn’t make it,” a 1952 entry says. “Tried hard. I don’t know if I’ll ever get another bird or pet. It’s tough on everyone when they die.”

White, born in 1906, started out as an itinerant journalist, working for newspapers in San Francisco and Los Angeles before becoming a narcotics aent in the early 1930s. During World War II he was in the Office of strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA. where he acquired the rank of lieutenant colonel and made future contacts. After that, he went back to his narcotics work, interrupting it in the early 1950s to become an investigator for the Serate committee headed by Sen. Estes Kefauver that looked into organized crime.

One interesting detail links White to the 1953 case of Dr. Frank Olson, and Army employee who was working with the CIA at Camp Detrick, Md. Olson had been given LSD without being told, and 10 days later jumped to his death from the 10th floor of a New York City hotel. At the time, Lashbrook was in the room with Olson, who had gone to New York to be treated by Dr. Harrold Abramson, a psychiatrist who had worked for the CIA.According to CIA documents, Lashbrook called Gottlieb, his supervisor at the time, and then went to the police station to identify the body. He was asked to “turn out his pockets.”

He had written on a piece of white paper the initials “G. W.” and “M.H.” Lashbrook was asked to identify whose initials they were, but expunged CIA documents said he could not for security reasons. However, knowledgeable sources who have seen the CIA documents said Lashbrook identified “G. W.” as George White and “M. H.” as Morgan Hall, White’s undercover name. The piece of paper also contained the address 81 Bedford St. which White’s diary shows to be the New York safe house.

CIAcid Trip

Revised, updated, and expanded.A Citadel Press Book
Published by Carol Pubishing Group
1998

LSD was invented in Switzerland by Albert Hofmann, a researcher for Sandoz pharmaceuticals. It did not spontaneously appear among the youth of the Western world as a gift from the God of Gettin’ High. The CIA was on to acid long before the flower children.

So, for that matter, were upstanding citizens like Time-Life magnate Henry Luce and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, who openly sang the praises of their magical mystery tours during the early sixties. Henry, a staunch conservative with close connections to the CIA, once dropped acid on the golf course and then claimed he had enjoyed a little chat with God.

While the cognoscenti had the benefit of tuned-in physicians, other psychedelic pioneers took their first trips as part of CIA-controlled research studies.

At least one person committed suicide after becoming an unwitting subject of a CIA LSD test, crashing through a highstory plate-glass window in a New York hotel as his Agency guardian watched. (Or perhaps the guardian did more than watch. In June 1994 the victim’s family had his thirty-year-old corpse exhumed to check for signs that he may have been thrown out that window.) Numerous others lost their grip on reality.

MK-ULTRA was the code name the CIA used for its program directed at gaining control over human behavior through “covert use of chemical and biological materials,” as proposed by Richard Helms. The name itself was a variation on ULTRA, the U.S. intelligence program behind Nazi lines in World War 11, of which the CIA’s veteran spies were justly proud.

Helms later became CIA director and gained a measure of notoriety for his ‘Watergate “lying to Congress” conviction and a touch of immortality in Thomas Powers’s aptly named biography, The Man Who Kept the Secrets. Helms founded the MK-ULTRA program and justified its notably unethical aspects with the rationale, “We are not Boy Scouts.”

At the time, the spook scientists suspected that LSD had the potential to reprogram the human personality. In retrospect, they were probably right-Timothy Leary spoke in similar terms, though he saw unlimited potential for self-improvement in this “reprogramming.” The CIA and the military simply couldn’t figure out how to harness the drug’s power. Thank goodness. Their idea was not to open “the doors of perception” but to convert otherwise free human beings into automatons.

“ ‘We must remember to thank the CIA and the army for LSD”, spoke no less an authority figure on matters psychedelic than John Lennon. “They invented LSD to control people and what it did was give us freedom.”

Or did it? The acid-tripping intersection between the CIA and the counterculture is one of the areas where the on-the-record facts about MK-ULTRA meld into the foggy region of conspiracy theory. It has been suggested, even by prominent participants in the counterculture, that with LSD the CIA found the ultimate weapon against the youth movement.

Officially, the MK-ULTRA program ran from 1953 to 1964, at which time it was renamed MK-SEARCH and continued until 1973. However, U.S. intelligence and military operations with the same purpose had been ongoing at least since World War 11 and likely chugged ahead for many years after MK- publicly stated conclusion. MK-ULTRA encompassed an undetermined number of bizarre and often grotesque experiments. In one, psychiatrist Ewen Cameron received CIA funding to test a procedure he called “depatterning.” This technique, Cameron explained when he applied for his CIA grant (through a front group called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology), involved the “breaking down of ongoing patterns of the patient’s behavior by means of particularly intensive elec- in addition to LSD. Some of his subjects suffered brain damage and other debilitations. One sued the government and won an out-of-court settlement in 1988.

Then there was operation “Midnight Climax,” in which prostitutes lured unsuspecting johns to a CIA bordello in San Francisco. There they slipped their clients an LSD mickey while Agency researchers savored the “scientific” action from behind a two-way mirror, a pitcher of martinis at the ready.

Author John Marks, whoseThe Search for the Manchurian Candidate is one of the most thoroughgoing volumes yet assembled on U.S. government mind-control research, readily admits that all of his source material comprised but ten boxes of documents—but those took him a year to comprehend despite the aid of a research staff.

Marks writes that he sought access to records of a branch of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, the Office of Research and Development (ORD), which took over behavioral (i.e., mind control) research after MK-ULTRA’s staff dispersed.

Marks was told that ORD’s files contained 130 boxes of documents relating to behavioral research. Even if they were all released, their sheer bulk is sufficient to fend off even the most dedicated—or obsessed—investigator. To generate such an intimidating volume of paper must have taken considerable time and effort. Yet curiously, the CIA has always claimed that its attempts to create real-life incarnations of Richard Condon’s unfortunate protagonist Raymond Shaw—the hypnotically programmed assassin of The Manchurian Candidate—were a complete bust.

If their demurrals are to be trusted, then this particular program constitutes one of the least cost-effective deployments of taxpayer dollars in the history of the U.S. government, which is rife with non-cost-effective dollar deployments.

The CIA’s most effective line of defense against exposure of their mind-control operations (or any of their operations, for that matter) has always been self-effacement. The agency portrays its agents as incompetent stooges, encouraging the public to laugh at their wacky attempts to formulate cancer potions and knock off foreign leaders.

Under this cover story, MK-ULTR’’s research team was nothing but a bunch of ineffectual eccentrics. “We are sufficiently ineffective so our findings can be published,” quipped one MK-ULTRA consultant.

Despite the findings of a Senate committee headed by Ted Kennedy that U.S. mind-control research was a big silly failure, and even though Marks—whose approach is fairly conservative—acknowledges that he found no record to prove it, the project may have indeed succeeded.

“I cannot be positive that they never found a technique to control people,” Marks writes, “despite my definite bias in favor of the idea that the human spirit defeated the manipulators.”

A sunny view of human nature, that. And indeed a consoling one. But the human spirit, history sadly proves, is far from indomitable. The clandestine researchers explored every possible means of manipulating the human mind. The CIA’s experiments with LSD are the most famous MK-ULTRA undertakings, but acid was not even the most potent drug investigated by intelligence and military agencies. Nor did they limit their inquiries to drugs. Hypnosis, electronic brain implants, microwave transmissions, and parapsychology also received intense scrutiny. Marks, Kennedy, and many others apparently believe that the U.S. government failed where alltoo-many far less sophisticated operations—from the Moonies to Scientology to EST—have scored resounding triumphs. Brainwashing is commonplace among “cults,” but not with the multimillion-dollar resources of the United States government’s military and intelligence operations?

For that matter, the (supposed) impetus for the program was the reported success of communist countries in “brainwashing.” The word itself originally applied to several soldiers who’d fought in the Korean War who exhibited strange behavior and had large blank spots in their memories—particularly when it came to their travels through regions of Manchuria. Those incidents were the inspiration for Condon’s novel, in which a group of American soldiers are hypnotically brainwashed by the Korean and Chinese communists and one is programmed to kill a presidential candidate.

Interestingly, the belief that one’s psyche is being invaded by radio transmissions or electrical implants is considered a symptom of paranoid schizophrenia. But there is no doubt that the CIA contemplated using those methods and carried out such experiments on animals, and the way these things go it would require the willful naivete of, say, a Senate subcommittee to maintain that they stopped there. Even Marks, who exercises the journalistic wisdom to stick only to what he can back up with hard documentation, readily acknowledges that the clandestine researchers “probably” planted electrodes in the brains of men. Marks points out that the electrode experiments “went far beyond giving monkeys orgasms,” one of the researchers’ early achievements.

The ultimate goal of mind control would have been to produce a Manchurian Candidate assassin, an agent who didn’t know he (or she) was an agent—brainwashed and programmed to carry out that most sensitive of missions. Whether the program’s accomplishments reached that peak will probably never be public knowledge. So we are left to guess whether certain humans have been ”programmed to kill.” In 1967, Luis Castillo, a Puerto Rican arrested in the Philippines for planning to bump off Ferdinand Marcos, claimed (while in a hypnotic trance) that he had been implanted with a posthypnotic suggestion to carry out the assassination. Sirhan Sirhan, convicted as the assassin of Robert F Kennedy, showed unmistakable symptoms of hypnosis. A psychiatrist testifying in Sirhan’s defense said that the accused assassin was in a trance when he shot Kennedy, albeit a self-induced one. Author Robert Kaiser echoed that doctor’s conclusions in his book RFK Must Die! Others, of course, have offered darker conjectures regarding the origins of Sirhan’s symptoms.

James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of Martin Luther King, also had a known fascination with hypnosis, and, more recently, British lawyer Fenton Bressler has assembled circumstantial evidence to support a theory that Mark David Chapman, slayer of John Lennon, was subject to CIA mind control. Way back in 1967, a book titled Were We Controlled?, whose unknown author used the pseudonym Lincoln Lawrence, stated that both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby were under mind control of some kind. The book may have had at least a trace of validity: Something in the book convinced Oswald’s mother that the author was personally acquainted with her son.

Did MK-ULTRA spin off a wave of history-altering assassinations—it whelp a brood of hypnoprogrammed killers? The definitive answer to that question will certainly never reach the public. We are left, with John Marks, to hope on faith alone that it did not, but always with the uneasy knowledge that it could have.

Perhaps not through assassinations, and perhaps not even intentionally, MK-ULTRA definitely altered a generation. John Lennon was far from the only sixties acid-hero to make the connection between the mood of the streets and the secret CIA labs. “A surprising number of counterculture veterans endorsed the notion that the CIA disseminated street acid en masse to deflate the political potency of the youth rebellion,” write Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain in Acid Dreams, their chronicle of both the clandestine and countercultural sides of the LSD revolution.

”By magnifying the impulse toward revolutionism out of context, acid sped up the process by which the Movement became unglued,” the authors continue. “The use of LSD among young people in the U.S. reached a peak in the late 1960s, shortly after the CIA initiated a series of covert operations designed to disrupt, discredit, and neutralize the New Left. Was this merely a historical coincidence, or did the Agency actually take steps to promote the illicit acid trade?”

The tale of Ronald Stark, told by Lee and Shlain, may provide the connection between the CIA and the Left. Stark was a leading distributor of LSD in the late 1960s-the same time acid use was at its heaviest-and apparently a CIA operative. The Agency has never admitted this, but an Italian judge deciding in 1979 whether to try Stark for “armed banditry” in relation to Stark’s many contacts with terrorists (among other things, Stark accurately predicted the assassination of Aldo Moro) released the drug dealer after finding “an impressive series of scrupulously enumerated proofs” that Stark had worked for the CIA “from 1960 onward.”

“It could have been,” mused Tim Scully, the chief of Stark’s major LSD-brewing outfit (a group of idealistic radicals called the Brotherhood who grew to feel exploited by Stark), ”that he was employed by an American intelligence agency that wanted to see more psychedelic drugs on the street.” But Lee and Shlain leave open the possibility that Stark may have been simply one of the world’s most ingenious con artists—a possibility acknowledged by most everyone to come in contact with Stark.

The CIA’s original ”acid dream” was that LSD would open the mind to suggestion, but they found the drug too potent to manage. Sometime around 1973, right before MK-ULTRA founder and, by then, CIA director Richard Helms hung up his trenchcoat and stepped down from the CIA’s top post, he ordered the majority of secret MK-ULTRA documents destroyed due to ”a burgeoning paper problem.” Among the eradicated material, Lee and Shlain report, were ”all existing copies of a classified CIA manual titled LSD: Some UnPsycbedelic Implications.”

There exists today no on-paper evidence (that anyone has yet uncovered) that MK-ULTRA was the progenitor of either a conspiracy to unleash remote-controlled lethal human robots or to emasculate an entire generation by oversaturating it with a mind-frying drug. But MK-ULTRA was very real and the danger of a secret government program to control the thoughts of its citizens, even just a few of them at a time, needs no elaboration.

“CIA Under Suspicion:‘Suicide’ of LSD guinea pig probed.”

Buried secrets of biowarfare

During the Cold War, top Army scientists toiled stealthily in rural Maryland to make covert weapons coveted by new enemies.

For years, in total secrecy, they studied the black art of bioterrorism.

They designed deadly, silent biological dart guns and hid them in fountain pens and walking sticks. They crunched lethal bacteria into suit buttons that could be worn unnoticed across borders. They rigged light fixtures and car tailpipes to loose an invisible spray of anthrax.

They practiced germ attacks in airports and on the New York subway, tracking air currents and calculating the potential death toll.

But they weren’t a band of al-Qaida fanatics — or enemies of any kind. They were biowarriors in the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick.

From 1949 to 1969, at the jittery height of the Cold War, the division tested the nation’s vulnerability to covert germ warfare — and devised weapons for secret biological attacks if the United States chose to mount them.

A few years ago, its story — never before told in detail — would have seemed a macabre footnote to U.S. history.

Now, after the Sept. 11 attacks, the anthrax mailings and a steady stream of government warnings on terrorism, the fears of the 1950s have returned — and the experiments of Fort Detrick’s covert bioweapons makers suddenly resonate in a new era. In the biological realm, there is little that any terrorist group could concoct that Fort Detrick’s “dirty tricks department,” as veterans call it, didn’t think up decades ago.

But because of the division’s scant recordkeeping and the fast-disappearing ranks of its aged scientist-warriors, the knowledge it acquired is being lost to history.

One of the few survivors is Wallace Pannier, 76, who remembers standing in a Frederick County field watching sheep shot with what the Army called a “nondiscernible bioinoculator” — a dart gun. The bosses demanded a dart so fine that it could penetrate clothing and skin unnoticed, then dissolve, leaving no trace in an autopsy.

“If the sheep jumped, that meant people were going to jump, too,” said Pannier, now living a quiet life tending his flowers and shrubs in Frederick.

Once perfected, the dart gun astonished those who saw it in action. Charles Baronian, a retired Army weapons official, recalls a demonstration at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

“Twenty-five seconds after it was shot, the sheep just fell to the ground,” said Baronian, 73. “It didn’t bleat. It didn’t move. It just fell dead. You couldn’t help but be impressed.”

The rest of the Army’s offensive biological weapons program thought big: 500-pound anthrax bombs that could contaminate entire cities. But the Special Operations Division — known at Fort Detrick by its initials, SO — studied biowarfare on a more intimate scale, figuring ways to kill an individual, disable a roomful of people or touch off an epidemic.

‘Army has no records’

The existence of the SO Division was revealed only six years after it shut down, in a 1975 Senate investigation into CIA abuses. Senators wanted to know why the CIA had retained a lethal stock of shellfish toxin and cobra venom after President Richard M. Nixon’s 1969 order to destroy all biological weapons stocks. They found that the poisons had come from the SO Division under a CIA-Army project code-named MKNAOMI.

But records show that even CIA bosses were stymied as they tried to get the facts on the SO Division. “The practice of keeping little or no record of the activity was standard MKNAOMI procedure,” a CIA investigator wrote. The military offered little help, he added: “The Army has no records on MKNAOMI or on the Special Operations Division.”

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The Sun, the Army said no records of the Special Operations Division could be found. Nor is there any mention at the National Archives, which reclassified Fort Detrick’s old biowarfare records after the Bush administration ordered agencies to withhold anything that might aid terrorists.

Few SO Division veterans are still alive. Fewer still are willing to describe their work. They are not sure what is still classified and don’t relish leaving biological horror tales for their grandchildren.

“I just don’t give interviews on that subject,” said Andrew M. Cowan Jr., 74, the division’s last chief, who is retired and living near Seattle. “It should still be classified — if nothing else, to keep the information the division developed out of the hands of some nut.”

But it is possible to assemble a patchwork portrait from documents obtained by The Sun under the Freedom of Information Act, Senate investigative files and private document collections, including the National Security Archive in Washington and even the Church of Scientology, which long collected material on government mind-control research.

And a few Detrick retirees who worked in the SO Division or collaborated with it spoke sparingly about what they know. Most are proud of their work, pointing out that the Soviet biological program was much larger and also developed assassination tools.

Unsuccessful attacks

The veterans still slip into biowarrior-speak, in which “good” means good-and-lethal. “It made a real nice aerosol,” they’ll say, or “That would give you real good coverage.”

All say that if the biological devices they made were used against humans, they never learned about it. But it is impossible to be certain, they say, because the program was strictly compartmented: One worker didn’t know what another was doing, let alone what CIA or Special Forces did with the bioweapons.

The 1975 Senate investigation revealed that the SO Division supplied biological materials for several planned CIA attacks, none of which were successful.

In 1960, the CIA’s main contact with the SO Division, Sidney Gottlieb, carried a tube of toxin-laced toothpaste to Africa in a plot to kill Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. But the CIA station chief balked and pitched the poison into a river, a congressional investigation later revealed.

Records suggest, though they do not prove, that the SO Division also supplied germs for CIA schemes to kill or sicken Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and that it came up with the poisoned handkerchief that the agency’s drolly-named Health Alteration Committee sent to Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qasim in 1963. (He survived.)

Army Special Forces also asked the SO Division to design biological assassination weapons. Fort Detrick’s engineers delivered five devices — including the dart gun — collectively known as the “Big Five.” But records of what Special Forces did with the weapons remain classified, said Fort Bragg archivist Cynthia Hayden.

If the work sounds sinister today, there were doubters at the time, too. A 1954 Army document says high-ranking officials — including George W. Merck, the pharmaceutical executive and top government adviser on biowarfare — wanted to shut down the SO Division because they considered it “un-American.”

But Fort Detrick’s rank and file rarely voiced such doubts. “We did not sit around talking about the moral implications of what we were doing,” said William C. Patrick III, a Fort Detrick veteran who worked closely with the SO Division. “We were problem-solving.”

And if the orders came to unleash the weapons, Fort Detrick’s biowarriors were ready.

During the Vietnam War, William P. Walter, who supervised anthrax production at Fort Detrick and worked with the SO Division on projects, asked British intelligence agents for blueprints of the office occupied by North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. Plotting a covert germ assault is easier if the room’s cubic footage and ventilation system are known, he says.

“We thought if the president of the United States wants to kill somebody, we want to be able to do it,” said Walter, now 78 and retired in Florida.

Opening of the division

A gun or a bomb leaves no doubt that a deliberate attack has occurred. But if someone is stricken with a sudden, fatal illness — or an epidemic slashes across a crowded city — there is no way of knowing whether anyone attacked, much less who.

That was the key conclusion of the Pentagon’s Committee on Biological Warfare in a secret October 1948 report on covert biowarfare.

At the time, the United States feared a shadowy global enemy, organized in secret cells overseas and on U.S. soil –Communists. Echoing today’s fears, the report said the United States “is particularly vulnerable” to covert germ attack because enemy agents “are present already in this country [and] there is no control exercised over the movements of people.”

Although it emphasized the threat to America, the report called for offensive capability. “Biological agents would appear to be well adapted to subversive use since very small amounts of such agents can be effective,” the report said. “A significant portion of the human population within selected target areas may be killed or incapacitated.”

Seven months later, in May 1949, the Special Operations Division quietly opened at Fort Detrick.

The other divisions there, created during and after World War II, focused on large-scale biological attack, said Walter, who completed a quadruple major at Mount St. Mary’s College in Emmittsburg and went to work at Fort Detrick in 1951.

At the time, planners regarded bioweapons as a valuable military option — more devastating than chemical weapons, but more selective than a nuclear attack.

“Biological agents can really cover more territory than nuclear weapons,” Walter said. “Biological’s better than nuclear because it doesn’t destroy the buildings.”

Shrouded in secrecy

Fort Detrick’s other divisions had diabolical tricks of their own. For instance, Walter said, their scientists bred antibiotic-resistant bacteria to make standard Soviet and Chinese treatments useless against U.S. weapons.

Still, the veterans say, Special Operations stood apart. You didn’t apply for SO, you were chosen. And even within the tight-lipped world of Fort Detrick, the SO Division’s secrecy was extraordinary.

“Most of the people [at Fort Detrick] didn’t know what was going on in SO,” Pannier said. “And they got angry because you wouldn’t tell ’em what was going on.”

When Pannier hitchhiked to Fort Detrick to take up his new assignment in 1946, he saw so many guard towers that he thought he had been sent to a prison. After three years there, he went home to Utah and completed a degree in bacteriology. When he returned, his former boss recommended him to the SO Division, “sort of a little Detrick within Detrick.”

SO Division personnel — about 75 at the unit’s peak — didn’t get the usual parking stickers. They had metal tags that could be removed from their cars when they traveled undercover.

Pannier spent a night on the roof of the Pentagon taking air samples to rule out a bioattack before a visit by President John F. Kennedy.

He was also assigned to see what germs were leaking from a Merck pharmaceutical plant on the Susquehanna River, observations that would be crucial to U.S. spies trying to identify Soviet bioweapons facilities. Pannier posed variously as a fisherman, an air-quality tester and a driver with a broken-down car.

When East Bloc officials who were suspected of working in biowarfare labs traveled abroad, U.S. agents secretly swabbed their clothes so the SO Division could test for germs.

Fanning out across the country, SO Division officers also played the role of bioterrorists in an era before the word had even been coined. Their usual mock weapons were two forms of bacteria, Bacillus globigii (BG) and Serratia marcescens (SM).

Scientists thought both were harmless, though later research found that SM could cause illness or death in people with weakened immune systems.

In an elaborate 1965 attempt to assess how travelers might be used to spread smallpox, SO Division officers loosed BG in the air at Washington National Airport and at bus stations in Washington, Chicago and San Francisco, then tracked its movement using air samplers disguised as suitcases.

Tracking travelers’ routes, Fort Detrick scientists plotted on a U.S. map the smallpox cases that would result from a real release.

The germ-spreaders were never challenged, the report noted: “No terminal employee, passenger or visitor gave any outward indication of suspicion that something unusual was taking place.”

The next year, without alerting local officials, SO Division agents staged a mock attack on the New York subway, shattering light bulbs packed with BG powder on the tracks.

“People could carry a brown bag with light bulbs in it and nobody would be suspicious,” Pannier said. “But when [a bulb] would break, it would burst. … The trains swishing by would get it airborne.”

The SO Division’s report concluded that “similar covert attacks with a pathogenic agent during peak traffic periods could be expected to expose large numbers of people to infection and subsequent illness or death.”

Understanding U.S. vulnerability may have been the main purpose of such experiments. But defensive findings had offensive implications. No one had to tell experimenters that Moscow, too, had a subway.

‘Big Five’ arsenal

If the subway tests could be explained as defensive, there was no such ambiguity in the SO Division’s development of covert biological weapons.

Mysterious characters from Fort Bragg and the CIA came and went at the SO Division, leaving wish-lists and checking progress. For cover, CIA visitors often wore military uniforms and said they worked for “Staff Support Group.” No one mentioned aloud the name of the agency financing so much of the division’s work.

“It was never really said, except that probably by the middle ’60s it became obvious,” Pannier said. Army bosses “would ask: ‘Are you keeping them happy?'”
Most CIA records on the SO Division were apparently destroyed in 1973 by Gottlieb, the agency’s liaison to Fort Detrick. But declassified invoices the division submitted to the CIA give a sense of the work.

Germ dispensers could be concealed in many objects, such as the exhaust system on a 1953 Mercury. (“It might look like a smoky, oil-burning car,” Pannier said.) There were invoices for fountain pens, even “1 Toy Dog, 98 cents.”

There are receipts for books with suggestive titles: The Assassins, The Enemy Within, Dictionary of Poisons. There are rent bills for cabins at state parks — a favorite site for secret meetings.

And there is much ado about dogs, including supplies for a “Buster Project.” One plan for the dart guns was to knock out guard dogs so U.S. agents could sneak into foreign facilities.

But dogs were not the primary target of the SO Division’s creative efforts. “The requirements of the Army Special Forces were the driving force defining SOD activities, and … Special Forces’ interest included a number of weird things, definitely among which was assassination,” a CIA retiree told an agency investigator in 1975, according to a declassified report.

The former CIA man referred to the arsenal that came to be called the Big Five. “The Big Five program was devoted to assassination,” said Patrick, who worked closely with the SO Division as chief of product development at Fort Detrick. He calls it “the most sensitive program we ever created at Detrick,” and says its details should still be kept secret because they might be useful to terrorists and “embarrassing to the United States.”

Walter, the former Detrick anthrax maker, calls the Big Five “hair-raising. We really kept that thing hush-hush,” he said.

Detailed descriptions of the Big Five remain classified. But documents show that they included at least one version of the biological dart, dipped in shellfish toxin and fired from a rifle using a pressurized air cartridge.

Walter recalled that colleagues were sent overseas to collect the mussels that produced the poison, into which the darts would be dipped. Tiny grooves guided the dose: “You could time a death by the load [of toxin] you shot,” he said.

Among the other Big Five weapons: a 7.62 mm rifle cartridge packed with anthrax or botulinum toxin that would disperse in the air on impact; a time-delay bomblet that would release a cloud of bacteria when a train or truck convoy passed; and a pressurized can that sprayed an aerosol of germs. The fifth is described in unclassified documents only as an “E-41 disseminator.”

Walter recalls an effort to package the spray device in a food can for smuggling into the Soviet Union and planting in a target’s office or apartment.

“We had a hell of a time with that because we had to get Russian cans,” he said. “It had to look exactly like an ordinary can.”

‘Nothing has changed’

Of all the old bioweaponeers, Patrick is the only one who still has ties to U.S. biodefense programs, working as a consultant and trainer. But he said the government has made little effort to learn from the work of the Special Operations Division and the larger biowarfare program.

Although bioengineering today could produce more virulent pathogens, “nothing has changed” in the most challenging part of covert biological attack: delivering germs so that they infect people, Patrick said.

“The problem today is there’s a huge disconnect between what us old fossils know and what the current generation knows,” Patrick said. “The good doctors at CDC [the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] don’t have a clue about aerosol dissemination, and the military is not much better.”

Walter, in Florida, agreed with Patrick’s diagnosis. But he said it’s fine with him if the dark lessons of Fort Detrick’s early days are lost forever.

“When we all die off, that’s it,” he said. “If anybody with bad intentions got hold of the things we had, it would be disastrous.”

CLOSE

Suicide Revealed:
CIA Infiltrated 17 Area Groups, Gave Out LSD

By Thomas O’Tooole
Washington Post Staff Writer

Washington Post
Page 1
June 11, 1975

This is the paper in which the first news about the death of Frank Olson arrived, twenty-two years late. The Frank Olson story, “Suicide Revealed,” is on the left side, about half-way down. The word “revealed” in the headline is ironic in that no name is provided.

A civilian employee of the Department of the Army unwittingly took LSD as part of a Central Intelligence Agency test, then jumped 10 floors to his death less than a week later, according to the Rockefeller commission report released yesterday.

The man was given the drug while attending a meeting with CIA personnel working on a test project that involved the administration of mind-bending drugs to unsuspecting Americans and the testing of new listening devices by eavesdropping on citizens who were unaware they were being overheard.

“This individual was not made aware he had been given LSD until about 20 minutes after it had been administered,” the commission said. “He developed serious side effects and was sent to New York with a CIA escort for psychiatric treatment. Several days later, he jumped from a tenth-floor window of his room and died as a result.”

The CIA’s general counsel ruled that the death resulted from “circumstances arising out of an experiment undertaken in the course of his official duties for the United States government.” His family, thus, was eligible for death benefits. And two CIA employees were “reprimanded” by the director.

The Rockefeller commission report on domestic CIA activities said it did not know how many Americans were given “behavior influencing” drugs by the CIA, declaring that “all persons directly involved in the early phases of the program were either out of the country and not available for interview or were deceased.”

The practice of giving drugs to unsuspecting people lasted from 1953 to 1963, when it was discovered by the CIA’s inspector general and stopped, the commission said.

Drugs also were tested on volunteers and were part of a “much larger” program to study ways of controlling human behavior. Other studies “explored the effects of radiation, electric shock, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and harassment substances.

The commission report said that all the drug program “records were ordered destroyed in 1973, including a total of 152 separate files.”

The commission did not say who ordered the files destroyed or why such an order was given. A commission spokesman said that all documented evidence for the drug tests was turned over to the White House, where it will remain indefinitely.

How widespread the practice was of testing new listening devices on unsuspecting people also will remain a mystery. The commission said only that “in the process of this testing, private communications, presumably between United States citizens, have sometimes been overheard.”

The commission said that some conversations were recorded, then destroyed when the listening devices were fully tested. It said there was never any evidence that the tests or recordings were used against the people whose conversations were listened to or recorded.

Also mentioned by the commission was the CIA practice of forging documents, such as Social Security cards, bank cards, library cards and club cards.

Only the Social Security Administration was told of this practice, which was recently scaled down to almost eliminate the manufacture of false credit cards, drivers licenses and birth certificates.

The commission found all three practices unsavory, but reserved its harshest language for the drug tests.

“It was clearly illegal to test potentially dangerous drugs on unsuspecting United States citizens.”

The only drug mentioned is LSD, which the CIA began to use on test subjects as long as 25 years ago. The commission said the CIA began its drug tests because of reports that the Soviet Union was using drugs to elicit confessions by political criminals, and expanded them when North Korea began brainwashing U.S. prisoners.

Four tests were begun on unsuspecting persons in 1953, then expanded two years later under what the commission called “an unfortunate arrangement” with the federal Bureau of Dug Abuse Control. Presumably, the commission means the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Narcotics since the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control was not established until 1965.

CLOSE

Memo from Stephen Endicott

Professor of History – York University
analyzing the documents obtained by the Olson family from CIA Director William Colby in June 1975Link to Stephen Endicott website

Here are my comments on twenty-five pages from the package of documents which I understand that the Director of Central Intelligence, William Colby, gave to the Olson family some years after the tragic death of Frank Olson. I’ve read them through twice, and about all I can do is summarize the impression that they leave on my mind.

I can see why the Olson family feel so dissatisfied with the official verdict of suicide as the cause of his death. At the same time it seems clear that Mr. Colby would not have given them the papers had he thought there was anything contained in them that might make possible a challenge and reversal of the official verdict. (One paragraph of the CIA report on Mr. Olson’s death is blanked out by a censor) Perhaps Colby didn’t pay close attention, because there are certainly some disquieting matters in the conduct and reported conversations of Frank Olson’s colleague, Robert Lashbrook, and the New York allergist, Dr. Harold Abramson, in the hours after Mr. Olson’s death.

Here is a summary of the scenario as formed in my mind:

Frank Olson, Ph.D, a biologist by profession, was a disturbed man in 1953. He had been working in the Biological Laboratory of the Special Operations Division, of the U. S. Army Chemical Corps (formerly known as the Chemical Warfare Service) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, for about ten years without any problem. According to his colleagues he had always been a popular, extroverted person and his professional, scientific work was considered to be outstanding. He was a branch chief and in October 1952 the confidence which his superiors had in him was reflected in the fact that they promoted him to be Acting Chief of the entire Special Operations Division.

After six months, in March 1953, Olson reverted back to his former position at his own request. It was also in March 1953 that he became mentally and emotionally disturbed. According to his wife, Alice, he could no longer sleep at nights, and she urged him to consult a psychiatrist. The cause of his disturbance is not made clear in the documents at hand, but it is said that he had begun to feel guilty about something. Was it from overwork and worry caused by the burdens of heading up the whole Division? It might have been, but by now he had been relieved of that burden. Another answer is suggested by a colleague: “It is well known,” wrote Dr. Howard Abramson after Olson’s death, “that it is an occupational hazard to mental stability to be doing the type of work connected with his [Olson’s] duties. Guilt feelings are well known to occur to a greater or less extent.” (Colby Pg. 38)

What was the nature of Olson’s duties? Stripped of technical language and put bluntly, they were to use his knowledge of biological and medical science to perfect secret ways to kill or incapacitate other humans, animals and plants.

The Special Operations Division of Fort Detrick was the most secret of secret places in the biological warfare program and only people with the highest security clearance could work there or gain admission to its grounds. Frank Olson counted himself in this number. It was the centre of covert biological warfare and as such the record of its activities are deeply buried. But it is known that the SOD was considered to be very effective, receiving commendation on “the originality, imagination and aggressiveness it has displayed in devising means and mechanisms for the covert dissemination of bacteriological warfare agents.” (Our BW book, pg 70.) When William Colby appeared before a Senate Committee in 1975 to explain the Agency’s involvement in biological warfare he remarked that from the outset this activity “was characterized by extreme compartmentation” [sic] and “a high degree of secrecy within CIA itself.”

Only two or three Agency officers at any time were cleared for access to Fort Detrick activities. (Senate hearings, pg 6). Frank Olson was one of these. But because of the compartmentalization it is unlikely that Frank Olson had much idea of what took place at Detrick beyond his work bench until he was promoted to be acting chief of the Special Operations Division. Even then he would have no knowledge of what happened to the products of Detrick when they left the encampment and he certainly had no idea that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had an offensive, first use policy for biological weapons applicable to the Korean War then in progress. He was working as a pure research scientist, solving technical problems surrounding the cultivation and spread of bacteria.

In late February and early March 1953 something happened which would have raised the profile of the Korean War sharply in Frank Olson’s mind. Two high ranking officers of the United States Marine Corps, who had been taken prisoner by the Chinese army in Korea, made lengthy, detailed confessions about the U. S. military forces using biological weapons in Korea and China. The Chinese broadcast their statements around the world. A glance at The New York TimesIndex for 1953 (pg 573) under the heading “Germ Warfare” shows the large number of articles on the subject day after day, and charges about the use of biological warfare as a crime against humanity.

Even though U. S. officials denied the Chinese claims, Frank Olson would have faced the stark possibility that his work was no longer “pure research.” It was at this time that his feelings of guilt arose, and according to his wife, he began to have sleepless nights.

How would the CIA cope with a man who is beginning to have doubts and who is in a position to reveal the most secret of its secrets?

In his early years at the biological warfare laboratory, during World War II, one of Frank Olson’s close colleagues there had been Dr. HAROLD ABRAMSON who was a specialist in immunology and allergies and who initiated the breakthrough therapy of penicillin aerosol for infected lungs. More recently his colleagues at the laboratory included DR. SID GOTTLEIB, who was chief of the Technical Services Division, and ROBERT V. LASHBROOK, Ph.D, who joined the organization only in 1952. Olson, Lashbrook and possibly Gottlieb were also members of the CIA group at Detrick. The chief of the Special Operations Division was VINCENT L. RUWET, a Lt. Colonel in the Chemical Corps and a man who described himself as a close personal friend of the Olson family. These men interacted with, one might say surrounded, Frank Olson in his last days before he either committed suicide, or as some suspect, was murdered.

In the autumn of 1953 Olson’s psychological state of mind worsened. This worsening coincided with considerable publicity in the press about the return to the United States of twenty-five airmen who had made confessions of using biological warfare in Korea. U. S. authorities claimed that the Chinese had “brainwashed” their prisoners, cleaned out their minds and inserted the false information. It was an absurd idea, a caricature of how the Chinese had induced their prisoners to write elaborate confessions, nevertheless, there was much discussion of the question at the United Nations and in the newspapers. (See New York Times Index, ibid.)

Meanwhile the CIA had become interested in the possibilities of “brainwashing.” Proof of this, which came to light many years later, was the contract it made with a Canadian psychiatrist in Montreal, Dr Ewen Cameron, to experiment illegally on his patients with LSD and possibly other drugs for such purposes.

One way, therefore, for the Agency to deal with its troubled member at Fort Detrick would be to have him forget all he knew about Special Operations, to clear out his mind by this supposed new technique of “brainwashing.” Then he could safely be allowed to retire from the service and return with his family to his home town in Wisconsin. Frank Olson himself believed “that the CIA group had been putting something like Benzedrine in his coffee at night to keep him awake.” (Colby Pg 37-38)

The Colby documents reveal that “an experiment” was tried on Olson, involving the use of some drug. The experiment appears to have been conducted with Olson’s consent and took place on Thursday, 19th November 1953. The experiment failed to work as intended. It did not clear his mind; it worsened his anxieties and nine days later Frank Olson was dead, having jumped or been pushed through a window on the tenth floor of the Statler Hotel in New York City.

Reporting on Frank Olson’s death in the Colby Papers proceeds on three levels.

At the first level there are the reports of the New York city policeman who came to the scene after a call from the Statler Hotel around 4 a.m. on 28th November as well as comments by two New York city detectives. These officers conclude that it was a case of suicide, although they toy with the idea that it might be a homicide because Robert Lashbrook had stayed in the same hotel room as Olson and because of his reluctance to answer certain questions.

At the second level are the reports of two Special Agents sent to question Lashbrook in New York City.

At the third level are memoranda by Dr. Howard Abramson and Lt. Colonel Vincent Ruwet giving their understandings about Frank Olson and About what happened in the last few days of his life.

The most striking information is that contained in the report of the two Special Agents who are identified only as “reporting agent for Case No 73317,” and “Walter P. T.,” which centres on the activities of Robert Lashbrook. The agency controlling these two agents is not identified in the documents. Are they also CIA? Or Department of Defense? The two agents, who did not seem to have any prior knowledge about Lashbrook (CIA agent) or his work unit, interviewed him intensively and followed him around all day following Olson’s death.

What follows are my comments on some ambiguities, coincidences and question marks that arise from the report of the two special agents on the death of Frank Olson:

Lashbrook said that Olson had jumped through the window shade and the window glass. What kind of window shade was it? Was it broken? If the window shade was Venetian blinds it would have been a virtually impossible scenario. Could it be that the window shade was lowered after the man went through the window?

The first call that Lashbrook made was not to the hotel management or the police, but to his superior, Dr. Sid Gottlieb, at his home in Virginia, to tell him what had happened. Then he reported to the hotel desk clerk and telephoned Dr. Abramson. He did not call Lt-Col Ruwet, the chief of the Special Operations Division, right away. Ruwet was a close friend of the Olson family, he had been in contact with Olson daily since June 1953 and had been with Lashbrook and Olson in New York until the previous day. Was there any significance to the sequence of these calls? [Gottlieb is mentioned by Colby in his testimony to the Senate Committee in September 1975, pg 22-23 as the person who destroyed CIA records on BW activities.]

Lashbrook told the police that Olson had come to New York on 24th November to seek help for mental illness. In view of Olson’s upset state of mind that was not unreasonable. But why had Olson been taken to see Dr Abramson who was not a psychiatrist at all but a skin allergist? Was it because Olson was suffering from some embarrassing aftermath of the drug ‘experiment’ of 19th November as well as from nervous disorder? Was it because Abramson, an old acquaintance of Olson’s in the Chemical Corps, could handle the situation without publicity? Lashbrook had also given Lt-Col Ruwet the impression that Olson was coming to New York to see a psychiatrist. (Colby, p. 46)

When Olson died there were no papers to identify him. Reportedly he himself had thrown away his papers, his identification badge and his wallet while walking around the city the previous day. As a result when reporters came to the police station they could get no information about the dead man’s identity and the story never hit the New York papers. This coincidence was extremely convenient for Lashbrook, the Chemical Corps and the CIA.

Lashbrook shared an apartment in Washington, D. C. with EDWIN SPOEHEL. Who was Edwin Spoehel?

The Reporting Agent notes that other than exhibiting fatigue, Lashbrook “appeared completely composed” throughout 28th November, the day Olson died. Robert Lashbrook must have been a hard-boiled type, nerves of steel.

Sid Gottlieb instructed Lashbrook to get a report from Dr. Abramson on Olson and bring it back to Washington with him. Lashbrook and special agent Walter P. T. Jr. went together to Abramson’s office at 9:15 in the evening of the 28th. Lashbrook asked agent Walter P. T. to remain in the reception room while he spoke to Dr. Abramson. While waiting in the outer office agent Walter P. T. was nevertheless able to overhear the conversation of the two men, which he records in his report. What transpired between Lashbrook and Abramson?

First they talked about security, and Abramson said to Lashbrook that he was worried about him. Did Lashbrook have something to worry about?

Lashbrook told Dr. Abramson something he should put in his report about Olson. The CIA agent dictated it to Dr. Abramson. First they both listened to portions of a tape recording of a conversation between “a physician or psychiatrist and the SUBJECT.” Then Lashbrook dictated to Abramson on the SUBJEC’’S behaviour prior to his demise. Since Abramson had attended Olson several times on the days previous to his death, why was it not sufficient that Abramson, a medical doctor, write up his own report?

It seems that the CIA wanted to make sure certain things were in a report that might become the basis of a claim to the Bureau of Employees Compensation. [ From reading Dr. Abramson’s report it is not readily evident what the CIA wanted in particular to have in it.] C. Lashbrook and Abramson adjourned their discussion and moved into another room apparently relaxing with a drink. Agent Walter P. T. heard Abramson remark to Lashbrook that he “was worried as to whether or not the deal was in jeopardy” and he thought “the operation was dangerous and the whole deal should be reanalyzed.” What was the “deal” which both Dr. Abramson and CIA Agent Lashbrook knew about?

What “operation” was dangerous? Was this conversation still relating to the Olson case? After all these years there may be no possibility of following up to find answers to these elusive and sometimes disturbing questions. Without knowing something more about them, especially about the shadowy figure of Robert Lashbrook, it would be difficult to determine with greater certainty how Frank Olson met his death. I hope that my speculations, and they are nothing more than that, may be of some interest and modest help to you.

Sincerely,
Stephen Endicott

June 6, 2001:

Dear Steve and Ned,

After studying your remarkable book more carefully it occurs to me to ask you about one of the most mysterious details in the documents I received from William Colby in 1975. I wonder if this will mean anything to you.

I refer to a two-page document entitled:

“MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD” SUBJECT: Project ARTICHOKE

The memorandum is dated 3 February 1975.

Both pages of the document are totally whited-out with the exception of a paragraph near the bottom of the second page. This reads as follows:

7. Little information pertaining to the suicide of Frank OLSON was found in the collection of materials made available by DDS&T. However, one brief memorandum dated 14 December 1953 mentioned the OLSON incident. The memorandum stated in part “LOVELL reported that QUARLES and George MERCK were about to kill the Schwab activity at Detrick as “un-American.” The memorandum later continued “LOVELL knew of Frank R. OLSON.”

Dr. John Schwab, whom I knew, was the founder and first director of Special Operations at Detrick.

I wonder what other light you might be able to shed on this, particularly on what “the Schwab activity” might refer to.

The other thing that has occurred to me on re-reading your book and considering the role of the CIA in BW in Korea is the very likely possibility that my father was the CIA’s man at Detrick, whose job may well have been that of linking Detrick’s resources with the CIA’s task of administering the secret deployment of BW in cooperation with the Air Force. This impression is strengthened by information we now have that proves that the purpose of Presidential “apology” our family received in 1975 was to deflect our intention to sue, which might have led to our discovering the true nature of my father’s job. It was not only the cover-up of his “bizarre death” (as this information refers to it) that was in question, but the nature of his work.

Best regards, – Eric

June 7, 2001

Dear Eric,

The meaning of “Schwab activity” is not apparent from the documents you have. I have a speculation about it though. It is related to that part of Special Operations which was said to be was one of Gottleib’s specialities: creating means (darts, toxins etc.) to assassinate particular individuals. I suppose that to people like George Merck this might seem to be an “un-American” activity. Merck, as you know, was one of the strongest promoters of the idea of using biological weapons in war, therefore he obviously wouldn’t have considered BW as such to be “un-American.” But individual acts of terror might have been in a different, troubling category in their minds. It’s just a thought.

I was reading your website yesterday and was quite amazed to find out about the circumstances of Colby’s death on the eve of being called up to testify before a Grand Jury! Did that Grand Jury meet and mark recommendations about investigating your father’s death?

Best, Steve

CLOSE

U.S. Knew in 1953 North Koreans Held American POW’s

By PHILIP SHENONThe New York Times
September 17, 1996, Tuesday

Newly declassified documents show that the United States knew immediately after the Korean War that North Korea had failed to turn over hundreds of American prisoners known to be alive at the end of the war, adding to growing speculation that American prisoners might still be alive and in custody there.

…experiments in which American prisoners were drugged in a program to ‘develop comprehensive interrogation techniques, involving medical, psychological and drug-induced behavior modification.’… At the end of the testing, the Americans were reportedly executed.

The documents, obtained from the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and other Government depositories by a Congressional committee, show that the Pentagon knew in December 1953 that more than 900 American troops were alive at the end of the war but were never released by the North Koreans.

The documents may only deepen the mystery over the fate of Americans still considered missing from the Korean War. In June a Defense Department intelligence analyst testified that on the basis of ”a recent flurry” of ”very compelling reports,” he believed that as many as 15 Americans were still being held prisoner in North Korea.

While not dismissing the analyst’s report entirely, the Defense Department has said it has no clear evidence that any Americans are being held against their will in North Korea, although it has pledged to continue to investigate accounts of defectors and others who say they have seen American prisoners there.

The North Korean Government has said it is not holding any Americans. A handful of American defectors are known to live in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, and some are believed to have appeared in North Korean propaganda films.

The documents were obtained by the House National Security subcommittee on military personnel. Congressional investigators said much of the information was confirmed by a former military aide to President Eisenhower, Col. Phillip Corso.

In a statement prepared for delivery before the House panel on Tuesday, Colonel Corso, who is retired, said, ”In the past I have tried to tell Congress the fact that in 1953, 500 sick and wounded American prisoners were within 10 miles of the prisoner exchange point at Panmunjom but were never exchanged.” Panmunjom was the site of peace negotiations between the United States and North Korea that ended with an armistice on July 27, 1953.

One of the documents obtained by the House subcommittee, a December 1953 memo that had been on file at the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kan., shows that the Army believed at that time that 610 ”Army people” and 300 Air Force personnel were still being held prisoners by the North Koreans, five months after a prisoner exchange between the United States and North Korea.

The memo said that President Eisenhower was ”intensely interested” in the fate of ”the missing P.O.W.’s,” and that he had wanted to make sure ”everybody was doing all they could about it.”

Al Santoli, a Congressional investigator who helped gather the documents, said the House subcommittee would explore the possibility that some of the American prisoners reported missing in 1953 were the same Americans reportedly sighted in recent years in North Korea.

He said that the intelligence information released by the Eisenhower Library had been declassified at the request of the subcommittee, and that it showed that the Eisenhower Administration ”was trying to do what it could to get the prisoners back” short of war.

Historians of the Korean War have suggested that the Eisenhower Administration chose not to make public much of its intelligence on the issue of missing Americans for fearing of whipping up a war hysteria among Americans who would have demanded that the prisoners be returned home.

”In a nuclear age, Eisenhower could not risk telling the Russians or the Chinese that we’re willing to go to all-out war to get our prisoners back,” Mr. Santoli said.

The hearing Tuesday of the subcommittee will include potentially explosive testimony from a Czech defector, Jan Sejna, who now works for the United States Defense Intelligence Agency.

Mr. Sejna, a former Czech defense official, had access to information about medical experiments carried out on American prisoners of war by Russian and Czech personnel in a hospital in North Korea during the war. Mr. Sejna had described experiments in which American prisoners were drugged in a program to ”develop comprehensive interrogation techniques, involving medical, psychological and drug-induced behavior modification.”

At the end of the testing, the Americans were reportedly executed.

CLOSE

SCIENTIST WAS ‘KILLED TO STOP HIM REVEALING DEATH SECRETS’; SO DID CHENEY AND RUMSFELD COVER UP A CIA ASSASSINATION?

London Sunday Express

By Gordon ThomasAugust 25, 2002

US Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld have been sensationally accused of covering up the “murder” of a former army scientist.

In 1953, Frank Olson, a key member of the CIA’s brainwashing programme MKULTRA, “plunged” from a New York hotel window.

He had allegedly threatened to reveal the CIA involvement in “terminal experiments” in post-war Germany and in Korea during the Korean War.

For almost half a century, his son Eric, a psychologist, has insisted his father as murdered on orders from the highest level. Now, California history professor Kathryn Olmstead says she has found documents written by Cheney and Rumsfeld which show how far the White House went to conceal information about Olson’s death.

She says Olson made anthrax and other biological weapons and that part of his work had been at Britain’s Porton Down Research Centre.

Eric Olson believes that Cheney and Rumsfeld were later given the task in the 1970s of covering up the details of his father’s death.

At that time Rumsfeld was White House Chief of Staff to President Gerald Ford. Dick Cheney was a White House assistant.

Among the papers found by Professor Olmstead is one that allegedly states: “Dr Olson’s job was so sensitive that it is highly unlikely that we would submit relevant evidence.”

In a memo, Cheney allegedly acknowledges that: “The Olson lawyers will seek to explore all the circumstances of Dr Olson’s employment, as well as those concerning his death. In any trial, it may become apparent that we are concealing evidence for national security reasons and any settlement or judgement reached thereafter could be perceived as money paid to cover up the activities of the CIA.”

Frank Olson’s family received $ 750,000 (then about GBP 400,000) to settle their claims in 1976.

Both the offices of Rumsfeld and Cheney have declined to comment on their role concerning the alleged coverup but, from his home outside Washington, Eric Olson said that the documents involving Rumsfeld and Cheney show they “have questions to answer”.

He added: “The documents show the lengths to which the government was trying to cover up the truth.”

However, CIA spokesman Paul Nowack insisted: “The CIA fully cooperated in allowing the truth to surface. Tens of thousands of documents were released”.

Eric Olson said his father was murdered to cover up his ultra-secret research in Korea and Europe.

He said: “My father was among scientists studying the use of LSD and other drugs to enhance interrogations as Cold War tensions ran high.”

He contends that, in the final days of his life, his father became “morally distraught” over his work and decided to quit.

Mercury News reporter Frederick Tulksy said: “In 1993, Eric Olson arranged for his father’s body to be unearthed and examined by James Starrs, a forensic scientist. Starrs concluded that Frank Olson had probably been struck on the head and then thrown out of the hotel window.”

In late November 1953, Frank Olson, then 43, joined a group of government officials at a conference at Deep Creek Lodge in western Maryland. For days afterward, Olson was withdrawn. His son, Eric, says his father told his wife that he intended to quit his job.

Frank Olson did not quit. On November 23, he went to New York and visited LSD researcher Harold A Abramson.

Olson went back to New York on November 28 and checked into the Statler Hotel. He was scheduled to enter a sanitarium the next day.

Early in the morning of November 29, Frank Olson went through the window of the hotel room he was sharing with colleague Robert Lashbrook. Lashbrook told the police he was awakened by the sound of breaking glass.

In 1975, a commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller issued a report on CIA abuses, Days later, the family was invited to the White House to meet President Ford. He assured them they would be given all information about what happened to Frank Olson.

This week, the Olsons’ attorney David Rudovsky, of Philadelphia, said: “It now appears that was not the case.”

CLOSE

MEMORANDUM

OVERVIEW
This memo sets out the information provided by both Dr William Sargant, consultant psychiatrist, and William Buckley, former Station Chief of the CIA in Beirut, Lebanon. Both believed your father was murdered by the CIA. To judge my credibility in accepting this claim I begin with:

PERSONAL BACKGROUND:
I am the author of thirty eight books published world wide. Total sales exceed 45 million copies. Five of my books have been made into successful motion pictures, including the Academy Award winning Voyage of the Damned. My other awards include the Critics; and Jurys’ prizes at the Monte Carlo Film Festival, an Edgar Allen Poe Award and three citations from the Mark Twain Society for Reporting Excellence.

I have written a number of non-fiction books dealing with the activities of various intelligence agencies. in 1998 1 wrote and presented for Britain’s Channel 4, “The Spying Machine”, a major television documentary in which for the first time key members of Mossad appeared, describing their work. My latest book on the Israeli service, “Gideon’s Spies,” to be published by St Martin’s Press in New York, will be published in 40 countries in April 1999.

In the 1950/60 period that is relevant to the events surrounding your father, I was a senior BBC writer/producer employed by the Science Department. Dr Sargant was engaged by me as a consultant for a number of programmes. A relationship developed between us that became close and remained so until his death in 1988.

The first lesson I learned during what has been a quarter of a century of writing about secret intelligence is that deception and disinformation are its stock-in-trade, along with subversion, corruption, blackmail and sometimes assassination. Agents are trained to lie and to use and abuse friendships. They are the very opposite of the dictum that gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.

I first encountered their behaviour while investigating many of the great spy scandals of the Cold War: the betrayal of America’s atomic bomb secrets by Klaus Fuchs and the compromising of Britain’s M15 and M16 by Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Kim Philby. Each made treachery and duplicity his byword. I also was one of the first writers to uncover the CIA’s obsession with mind control, a preoccupation the Agency was forced to confirm ten years after my book on the subject, Journey into Madness, appeared. Denial is the black art all intelligence services long ago perfected.

Nevertheless, in getting to the truth, I was greatly helped by two professional intelligence officers: Joachim Kraner, my late father-in-law, who ran an M16 network in Dresden in the post-World War II years, and Bill Buckley who was station chief of the CIA in Beirut in the 1980s. Both constantly reminded me that a great deal can be heard from what Bill called “murmurs in the mush;” a deadly skirmish fought in an alley with no name; the collective hold-your breath when an agent or network is blown; a covert operation which could have undone years of overt political bridge-building; a snippet of mundane information that completed a particular intelligence jigsaw. Through them I made contacts in a number of military and civilian intelligence agencies, Germany’s BND and France’s DGSE; the CIA; Canadian and British services. Later that network extended to include members of Israel’s security services including senior members of Mossad.

It is these contacts who have helped to reinforce the belief of both William Sargant and Bill Buckley that your father was murdered. I am assured that because of the highly unusual circumstances of your father’s death, the details have remained on file with several of the above-mentioned agencies, specifically the Mossad. The circumstances surrounding the death are taught as a case study at the Mossad Training School outside Tel Aviv. This has been confirmed by two former Mossad agents, Ari Ben-Menashe and Victor Ostrovsky.

Let me now turn to the specific information that both William Sargant and Bill Buckley provided me with on separate occasions over a number of years. At that time they were both alive and spoke on the usual understanding we had: that what they had to say would not be directly sourced to them. Both made a specific request that I should not publish ‘in any form’ what they told me about your father’s death because, as they believed they were among the few who knew the true circumstances, publication of such information could almost certainly be traced back to them. Given the circumstances they outlined, the outcome for either of them could be severe.

So: First to William Sargant,

At the time we spoke of your father, Dr Sargant was Director of Psychological Medicine at St Thomas’ Hospital, London, England. He was also a consultant to the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI5/6), largely because of his work in the eliciting of confessions by the Soviets. His conclusions can be found in his textbook “Battle for the Mind”; it remains a standard work on the subject of mind control

Because of my own family connections (detailed above), I was able to gain the trust of Dr Sargent. This developed during the time I used him in various documentary programmes for the BBC. It was during that period (1968169), that I first began to explore with him his own relationship with both M15/6 and the CIA. He told me lie had visited Langley several times and had met with Dr Sydney Gottlieb, Richard Helms and other senior CIA officials. During those visits he had also met with Dr Ewan Cameron and, on one occasion, he had met Dr Lashbrook and your father, Frank Olson.

Subsequently Dr Gottlieb and Frank Olson visited London and, according to Dr Sargent, he accompanied them to Porton Down, Britain’s main research centre for biological/chemical research. Dr Sargent’s interest in the work going on there was to study the psychological implications of mind-blowing drugs such as LSD.

He told me that he developed a rapport with Frank Olson during a number of subsequent visits Frank Olson made to Britain. Dr Sargant remarked that “he was just like any other CIA spy, using our secret airfields to come and go”. Evidence in support of that can be found in Frank Olson’s passport.

During this period (1953/5), Dr Sargant had met several more times with Dr Ewan Cameron, both in Washington and in Montreal, Canada. Cameron was engaged in secret experimental work for the CIA (details of that can be found in my book Journey into Madness).

Sargent said he knew that Frank Olson and Cameron knew each other and that Frank Olson also shared his (Sargant’s) view that some of the work Dr Gottlieb was funding Cameron to do through the Human Ecology Foundation (a CIAfront Organisation, was bordering on the criminal.

During the research and writing of Journey into Madness, Dr Sargent and I met on many occasions, perhaps as many as 20. During that time he gave me much valuable material relating to the work of Dr Cameron and insights into what he knew of Dr Gottlieb, Richard Helms and, of course, the death of your father.

By then, Dr Sargant was physically not a well man but his memory was still good. He could remember exact details with compelling clarity; for instance we once had a somewhat esoteric; conversation on how Patty Hearst (whom he had seen during her trial as an expert witness) would have survived some of the techniques that the CIA had developed in mind control.

From time to time, he referred to the death of your father and, as I clearly recall, he said his paperwork on the case had been handed over to the competent authorities in the British Secret Intelligence Service.

Time and again Dr Sargant expressed the view that, from all he had learned from the M15 and his own contacts in Washington, there was a strong prima facie case that Frank Olson had been murdered. Sargant believed that Frank Olson could also have been given a cocktail of drugs that included more than LSD. He said he knew that Dr Gottlieb had been researching into slow-acting depressants which, when taken, could drive a person to suicide.

He also believed that, from his own meetings with Frank Olson, there was a very real possibility that your father could become a whistle-blower if he believed that what was happening was wrong.

After my book was published, I continued to meet with Dr Sargent. At that time, I was hoping to see a new edition of the book published (this was not to be) and I wanted to get Dr Sargant’s permission to use all he had told me in a new edition. He said I could only publish what he had said after his death. He died in 1988. This Is the account he gave me of your father’s death which I now feel free to make public.
in the summer of 1953 Frank Olson travelled to Britain, once again to visit Parton Down. Sargent met with him. Olson said he was going to Europe to meet with a CIA team led by Dr Gottlieb. By then Sargent had learned that Frank Olson was acting deputy head of SO (Special Operations).

Sargent was satisfied that the CIA team were doing similar work that M16 were conducting in Europe – executing without trial known Nazis, especially SS men. (One of the survivors of the British “hit squad” is Peter Mason who lives in Montana: I know nothing about him).

Sargant saw Frank Olson after his brief visit to Norway and West Germany, including Berlin, in the summer of 1953. He said he was concerned about the psychological changes in Frank Olson. In Sargent’s view Olson, primarily a researchbased scientist, had witnessed in the field how his arsenal of drugs, etc. worked with lethal effect on human beings (the “expendable” SS men etc.). Sargant believed that for the first time Olson had come face to face with his own reality.

Sargant told me he believed Frank Olson had witnessed murder being committed with the various drugs he had prepared. The shock of what he witnessed, Sargent believed, was all the harder to cope with given that Frank Olson was a patriotic man who believed that the United States would never sanction such acts. Part of that assumption was formed by Sargent because he had come to see Frank Olson as a somewhat naive man: “locked up in his lab mentality” was, I recall, one of the phrases Sargant used.

I remember Sargent telling me that he spoke several times in 1953 with Frank Olson at Sargent’s consulting rooms in Harley Street, London. These were not formal patient/doctor consultations but rather Sargent trying to establish what Frank Olson had seen and done in Europe.

He decided that Frank Olson could pose a security risk if he continued to speak and behave as he did. He recommended to his own superiors at the SIS that Frank Olson should no longer have access to Portion Down or to any ongoing British research at the various secret establishments Olson had been allowed prior free access to.

Sargent told me his recommendation was acted upon by his superiors. He was also certain that his superiors, by the nature of the close ties with the CIA, would have informed Richard Helms and Dr Gottlieb of the circumstances why Frank Olson would no longer be given access to British research. Effectively a substantial part of Frank Olson’s importance to the CIA had been cut off.

When Dr Sargant learned of Frank Olson’s death — I recall him telling me it came in a priority message from the British Embassy in Washington Sargant came to the immediate conclusion that Olson could only have been murdered. I recall him telling me that in many ways the staged death was almost classic.

BILL BUCKLEY, Station Chief of the CIA in Beirut (1983).

Again through my family connection and the contacts I had established independently with various Intelligence services, I came to know Bill Buckley. (see pp Chap 4, “Journey into Madness”). At various stages in our friendship the question of Frank Olson’s death came up.

I told Bill what Dr Sargant believed. Bill said that Sargant was right but that he was sure that Richard Helms and Sydney Gottlieb would have ensured that nothing would ever be proven. Buckley described both men as expert in hiding or destroying evidence.

I hope this helps to set the record straight.
Gordon Thomas

Also by Gordon Thomas:

Non-Fiction:
DESCENT INTO DANGER
BED OF NAILS
PHYSICIAN EXTRAORDINARY
HEROES OF THE R.A.F.
THEY GOT BACK
MIRACLE OF SURGERY
THE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE AND YOU
THAMES NUMBER ONE
MIDNIGHT TRADER$
THE PARENT’S HOME DOCTOR (with lan D Hudson, Vincent Pippet)
TURN BY THE WIN DOW (with Ronald Hutchinson)
ISSELS: THE BIOGRAPHY OF A DOCTOR
THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED (with Max MorganWitts)
EARTHQUAKE (with Max MorganWitts)
SHIPWRECK (with Max MorganWitts)
VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED (with Max MorganWitts)
THE DAY GUERNICA DIED (with Max MorganWitts)
ENOLA GAY/RUIN FROM THE AIR (with Max MorganWitts)
THE DAY THE BUBBLE BURST (With Max MorganWifts)
TRAUMA (with Max MorganWitts)
PONTIFF (with Max MorganWitts)
THE YEAR OF ARMAGEDDON (with Max MorganWitts)
THE OPERATION
DESIRE AND DENIAL
THE TRIAL: The Life and Inevitable Crucifixion of Jesus
JOURNEY INTO MADNESS
ENSLAVED
CHAOS UNDER HEAVEN
TRESPASS INTO TEMPTATION
GIDEON’S SPIES
MAGDALENE

A STUDY OF ASSASSINATION

DEFINITIONAssassination is a term thought to be derived from “Hashish,” a drug similar to marijuana, said to have been used by Hasan-Dan-Sabah to induce motivation in his followers, who were assigned to carry out political and other murders, usually at the cost of their lives.

It is here used to describe the planned killing of a person who is not under the legal jurisdiction of the killer, who is not physically in the hands of the killer, who has been selected by a resistance organization for death, and whose death provides positive advantages to that organization.

EMPLOYMENT
Assassination is an extreme measure not normally used in clandestine operations. It should be assumed that it will never be ordered or authorized by any U.S. Headquarters, though the latter may in rare instances agree to its execution by members of an associated foreign service. This reticence is partly due to the necessity of committing communications to paper. No assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded. Consequently, the decision to employ this technique must nearly always be reached in the field, at the area where the act will take place. Decision and instructions should be confined to an absolute minimum of persons. Ideally, only one person will be involved. No report may be made, but usually the act will be properly covered by normal news services, whose output is available to all concerned.
JUSTIFICATION
Murder is not morally justifiable. Self-defense may be argued if the victim has knowledge which may destroy the resistance organization if divulged. Assassination of persons responsible for atrocities or reprisals may be regarded as just punishment. Killing a political leader whose burgeoning career is a clear and present danger to the cause of freedom may be held necessary.

But assassination can seldom be employed with a clear conscience. Persons who are morally squeamish should not attempt it.
CLASSIFICATIONS
The techniques employed will vary according to whether the subject is unaware of his danger, aware but unguarded, or guarded. They will also be affected by whether or not the assassin is to be killed with the subject. Hereafter, assassinations in which the subject is unaware will be termed “simple”; those where the subject is aware but unguarded will be termed “chase”; those where the victim is guarded will be termed “guarded.”

If the assassin is to die with the subject, the act will be called “lost.” If the assassin is to escape, the adjective will be “safe.” It should be noted that no compromises should exist here. The assassin must not fall into enemy hands.
A further type division is caused by the need to conceal the fact that the subject was actually the victim of assassination, rather than an accident or natural causes. If such concealment is desirable the operation will be called “secret”; if concealment is immaterial, the act will be called open”; while if the assassination requires publicity to be effective it will be termed “terroristic.”

Following these definitions, the assassination of Julius Caesar was safe, simple, and terroristic, while that of Huey Long was lost, guarded and open. Obviously, successful secret assassinations are not recorded as assassination at all. [Illeg] of Thailand and Augustus Caesar may have been the victims of safe, guarded and secret assassination. Chase assassinations usually involve clandestine agents or members of criminal organizations.

THE ASSASSIN
In safe assassinations, the assassin needs the usual qualities of a clandestine agent. He should be determined, courageous, intelligent, resourceful, and physically active. If special equipment is to be used, such as firearms or drugs, it is clear that he must have outstanding skill with such equipment.

Except in terroristic assassinations, it is desirable that the assassin be transient in the area. He should have an absolute minimum of contact with the rest of the organization and his instructions should be given orally by one person only. His safe evacuation after the act is absolutely essential, but here again contact should be as limited as possible. It is preferable that the person issuing instructions also conduct any withdrawal or covering action which may be necessary.

In lost assassination, the assassin must be a fanatic of some sort. Politics, religion, and revenge are about the only feasible motives. Since a fanatic is unstable psychologically, he must be handled with extreme care. He must not know the identities of the other members of the organization, for although it is intended that he die in the act, something may go wrong. Will the Assassin of Trotsky has never revealed any significant information, it was unsound to depend on this when the act was planned.

PLANNING
When the decision to assassinate has been reached, the tactics of the operation must be planned, based upon an estimate of the situation similar to that used in military operations. The preliminary estimate will reveal gaps in information and possible indicate a need for special equipment which must be procured or constructed. When all necessary data has been collected, an effective tactical plan can be prepared. All planning must be mental; no papers should ever contain evidence of the operation.
In resistance situations, assassination may be used as a counter-reprisal. Since this requires advertising to be effective, the resistance organization must be in a position to warn high officials publicly that their lives will be the price of reprisal action against innocent people. Such a threat is of no value unless it can be carried out, so it may be necessary to plan the assassination of various responsible officers of the oppressive regime and hold such plans in readiness to be used only if provoked by excessive brutality. Such plans must be modified frequently to meet changes in the tactical situation.

TECHNIQUES
The essential point of assassination is the death of the subject. A human being may be killed in many ways but sureness is often overlooked by those who may be emotionally unstrung by the seriousness of this act they intend to commit. The specific technique employed will depend upon a large number of variables, but should be constant in one point: Death must be absolutely certain. The attempt on Hitler’s life failed because the conspiracy did not give this matter proper attention.

Techniques may be considered as follows:

1. Manual
It is possible to kill a man with bare hands, but very few are skillful enough to do it well. Even a highly trained Judo expert will hesitate to risk killing by hand unless he has absolutely no alternative. However, the simplest local tools are often much the most efficient means of assassination. A hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice. A length of rope or wire or a belt will do if the assassin is strong and agile. All such improvised weapons have the important advantage of availability and apparent innocence. The obviously lethal machine gun failed to kill Trotsky where an item of sporting goods succeeded.

In all safe cases where the assassin may be subject to search, either before or after the act, specialized weapons should not be used. Even in the lost case, the assassin may accidentally be searched before the act and should not carry an incriminating device if any sort of lethal weapon can be improvised at or near the site. If the assassin normally carries weapons because of the nature of his job, it may still be desirable to improvise and implement at the scene to avoid disclosure of his identity.

2. Accidents
For secret assassination, either simple or chase, the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated.

The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. Bridge falls into water are not reliable. In simple cases a private meeting with the subject may be arranged at a properly-cased location. The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the “horrified witness”, no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary. In chase cases it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him. Care is required to insure that no wound or condition not attributable to the fall is discernible after death.

Falls into the sea or swiftly flowing rivers may suffice if the subject cannot swim. It will be more reliable if the assassin can arrange to attempt rescue, as he can thus be sure of the subject’s death and at the same time establish a workable alibi.

If the subject’s personal habits make it feasible, alcohol may be used [2 words excised] to prepare him for a contrived accident of any kind.

Falls before trains or subway cars are usually effective, but require exact timing and can seldom be free from unexpected observation.
Automobile accidents are a less satisfactory means of assassination. If the subject is deliberately run down, very exact timing is necessary and investigation is likely to be thorough. If the subject’s car is tampered with, reliability is very low. The subject may be stunned or drugged and then place in the car, but this is only reliable when the car can be run off a high cliff or into deep water without observation.

Arson can cause accidental death if the subject is drugged and left in a burning building. Reliability is not satisfactory unless the building is isolated and highly combustible.

3. Drugs
In all types of assassination except terroristic, drugs can be very effective. If the assassin is trained as a doctor or nurse and the subject is under medical care, this is an easy and rare method. An overdose of morphine administered as a sedative will cause death without disturbance and is difficult to detect. The size of the dose will depend upon whether the subject has been using narcotics regularly. If no, two grains will suffice.

If the subject drinks heavily, morphine or a similar narcotic can be injected at the passing out stage, and the cause of death will often be held to be acute alcoholism.

Specific poisons, such as arsenic or strychnine, are effective but their possession or procurement is incriminating, and accurate dosage is problematical. Poison was used unsuccessfully in the assassination or Rasputin and Kolohan, though the latter case is more accurately described as a murder.

4. Edge weapons
Any locally obtained edge device may be successfully employed. A certain minimum of anatomical knowledge is needed for reliability.
Puncture wounds of the body cavity may not be reliable unless the heart is reached. The heart is protected by the rib cage and is not always easy to locate.

Abdominal wounds were once nearly always mortal, but modern medical treatment has made this no longer true.

Absolute reliability is obtained by severing the spinal cord in the cervical region. This can be done with the point of a knife or a light blow of an axe or hatchet.

Another reliable method is the severing of both jugular and carotid blood vessels on both sides of the windpipe.

If the subject has been rendered unconscious by other wounds or drugs, either of the above methods can be used to insure death.

5. Blunt weapons
As with edge weapons, blunt weapons require some anatomical knowledge for effective use. Their main advantage is their universal availability. A hammer may be picked up almost anywhere in the world. Baseball and [illeg] bats are very widely distributed. Even a rock or a heavy stick will do, and nothing resembling a weapon need be procured, carried or subsequently disposed of.

Blows should be directed to the temple, the area just below and behind the ear, and the lower, rear portion of the skull. Of course, if the blow is very heavy, any portion of the upper skull will do. The lower frontal portion of the head, from the eyes to the throat, can withstand enormous blows without fatal consequences.

6. Firearms
Firearms are often used in assassination, often very ineffectively. The assassin usually has insufficient technical knowledge of the limitations of weapons, and expects more range, accuracy and killing power than can be provided with reliability. Since certainty of death is the major requirement, firearms should be used which can provide destructive power at least 100% in excess of that thought to be necessary, and ranges should be half that considered practical for the weapon.

Firearms have other drawbacks. Their possession is often incriminating. They may be difficult to obtain. They require a degree of experience from the user. They [illeg] is consistently over-rated.

However, there are many cases in which firearms are probably more efficient than any other means. These cases usually involve distance betweeen the assassin and the subject, or comparative physical weakness of the assassin, as with a woman.

(a) The precision rifle.
In guarded assassination, a good hunting or target rifle should always be considered as a possibility. Absolute reliability can nearly always be achieved at a distance of one hundred yards. In ideal circumastances, the range may be extended to 250 yards. The rifle shold be a wll made bolt or falling block action type, handling a powerful long-range cartirdge. The .300 F.A.B. Magnum is probably the best cartridge readily available. other excellent calibers are .375 M.[illeg]. Magnum, .270 Winchester, .30 – 106 p.s., 8 x 60 MM Magnum, 9.3 X 62 KK and others of this type. These are preferable to ordinary military calibers, since ammunition available for them is usually of the expanding bullet type, whereas most ammunition for military refles is full jacketed and hence not sufficiently lethal. Military ammunition should not be altered by filing or drilling bullets, as this will adversely affect accuracy.

The rifle may be of the “bull gun” variety, with extra heavy barrel and set triggers, but in any case should be able to group in one inch at one hundred yards, but 2 1/2″ groups are adequate. The sight shold be telescopic, not only for accuracy, but because such a sight is much better in dim light or near darkness. As long as the bare outline of the target is discernable, a telescope sight will work, even if the rifle and shooter are in total darkness.

An expanding, hunting bullet of such calibers as described above will produce extravagant laceration and shock at short or mid-range. if a man is struck just once in the body cavity, his death is almost entirely certain.

Public figures or guarded officials may be killed withgreat reliability and some safety if a firing point can be established prior to an official occasion. The propaganda value of this system may be very high.

(b) The machine gun.
Machine guns may be used in most cases where the precision rifle is applicable. Usually this will require the subversion of a unit of an official guard at a ceremony, though a skillful and determined team might conceivably dispose of a loyal gun crow without commotion and take over the gun at the critical time.

The area fire capacity of the machine gun should not be used to search out a concealed subject. This was tried with predictable lack of success on Trotsky. The automatic feature of the machine gun should rather be used to increase reliability by placing a 5 second burst on the subject. Even with full jacket ammunition, this will be absolute lethal is the burst pattern is no larger than a man. This can be accomplished at about 150 yards. In ideal circumstances, a properly padded and targeted machine gun can do it at 850 yards. The major difficulty is placing the first burst exactly on the target, as most machine gunners are trained to spot their fire on target by observation of strike. This will not do in assassination as the subject will not wait.

(c) The Submachine Gun.
This weapon, known as the “machine-pistol” by the Russians and Germans and “machine-carbide” by the British, is occasionally useful in assassination. Unlike the rifle and machine gun, this is a short range weapon and since it fires pistol ammunition, much less powerful. To be reliable, it should deliver at least 5 rounds into the subject’s chest, though the .45 caliber U.S. weaponshave a much larger margin of killing efficiency than the 9 mm European arms.

The assassination range of the sub-machine gun is point blank. While accurate single rounds can be delivered by sub-machine gunners at 50 yards or more, this is not certain enough for assassination. Under ordinary circumstances, the 5MG shold be used as a fully automatic weapon. In the hands of a capable gunner, a high cyclic rate is a distinct advantage, as speed of execution is most desirable, particularly in the case of multiple subjects.

The sub-machine gun is especially adapted to indoor work when more than one subject is to be assassinated. An effective technique has been devised for the use of a pair of sub-machine gunners, by which a room contailning as many as a dozen subjectgs can be “purifico” in about twenty seconds with little or no risk to the gunners. It is illustratrated below.

While the U.S. sub-machine guns fire the most lethal cartridges, the higher cyclic rate of some foreigh weapons enable the gunner to cover a target quicker with acceptable pattern density. The Bergmann Model 1934 is particularly good in this way. The Danish Madman? SMG has a moderately good cyclic rate and is admirably compact and concealable. The Russian SHG’s have a good cyclic rate, but are handicapped by a small, light protective which requires more kits for equivalent killing effect.

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LSD: YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW

LSD-25 was the 25th in a series of compounds derived from the rye fungus ergot in routine research at Switzerland’s Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratories. In 1943, five years after it was synthesized, Dr. Albert Hofmann, one of the codiscoverers, accidentally became aware of its odd effects on the human brain. In his account of history’s first acid trip, Dr. Hofmann wrote, “My field of vision swayed before me like the reflections in an amusement-park mirror. Occasionally, I felt as if I were out of my body.”

When other-people who ingested the drug reported similar effects, the chemical became something of a pharmaceutical curiosity: a mysterious drug searching for something to cure. Because of the resemblance between an LSD trip and psychosis, much of the early research was focused on mental illness. Wholesale experimentation with the drug was launched in the early 1950s. Neurotics, psychotics, depressives, alcoholics, epileptics, and even terminal-cancer patients were given LSD.

LSD never did find a disease to cure. But, by 1965, about 2,000 studies of the drug had been published: Conservative estimates suggest that over 30,000 psychiatric patients and several thousand normal volunteers had been given LSD during this period.

Around 1954, Eli Lilly & Company published the details of a new process they had developed for synthesizing lysergic acid (the parent molecule of the ergot alkaloids) cheaply and in bulk. The immediate effect of this breakthrough was to keep down the price of ergot alkaloids, which tip to then had been distributed only by Sandoz. But there were other unanticipated results as well. Vast quantities of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, could now be produced with reasonable ease in any sophisticated chemistry laboratory.At about the same time, a subculture of researchers began to experiment on themselves. Some wanted to experience madness firsthand; others sought a mystical union with the beyond. Harvard psychologists Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were discovered by the media in 1962, and the craze was on. Only researchers had access to LSD through legitimate channels, but when publicity created a demand for LSD, hip chemists rushed to create a supply. An enterprising Californian called Owsley, for example, is said to have produced more than a million doses of LSD over the next few years. (At 25 micrograms per dose, a million doses of LSD would weigh only nine ounces.) Owsley acid became world famous for its high quality. But when Owsley’s factory in Berkeley, California, was raided in February 1965, the case was thrown out of court since California law did not specifically regulate LSD.

This oversight was soon to be corrected. As the numbers of people using LSD multiplied, so did sensationalized accounts of its effects. Alarmed by these horror stories, federal and state authorities moved to ban the drug. California passed its anti-LSD laws in October 1966. By the end of the 1960s, LSD was illegal. But, by 1973, according to the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, almost 5 percent of adult Americans had tried LSD or a similar hallucinogen at least once.

It is now clear that, tinder controlled conditions, LSD is a relatively harmless drug. In 1960, UCLA psychiatrist Sidney Cohen reviewed studies of 5,000 persons who had taken LSD a total of 25,000 times. He reported that for every 1,000 persons taking LSD under medical supervision, there were 0.8 psychotic reactions lasting more than a day, and no attempted or com suicides. These figures compare quite favorably with Cohen’s estimates for patients in psychotherapy: 1.8 psychotic episodes per thousand patients, and 1.2 attempted suicides and 0.4 completed suicides per thousand.

Thus, psychotic episodes, attempted suicide, and actual suicide were more common among psychotherapy patients than among persons taking LSD under medical supervision. This is particularly impressive since so many LSD recipients actually received the drug in psychotherapy.

A similar survey in 1969 by Dr. Nicholas Malleson of 4,303 British patients who had taken a total of more than 50,000 doses of LSD came to much the same conclusion. Interestingly, the Malleson study also noted that those physicians who had the greatest experience with LSD therapy were least likely to observe adverse reactions. That is, the patients of inexperienced LSD therapists were more likely to have bad trips. These data stress the point that LSD is safe only when it is taken under adequate medical supervision. The personality of the LSD user, his expectations for the experience, the setting in which the drug is consumed-all are factors in the complicated equation that determines LSD’s effects.

According to the most recent surveys of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, LSD still has a following. As large a percentage of the population took the drug in 1976 as in 1972. Dr. loan Rittenhouse, supervisory research psychologist at the National Institute, believes that LSD’s failure to achieve wider popularity stems from newspaper reports that the drug produces chromosome damage. Although the belief that LSD causes birth defects is quite controversial in scientific circles, it seems to be widely accepted by the public.

—James Hassett

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Shutting off curiosity:

Notes on Evan Thomas’ book,The Very Best Men—Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA

Diary entry
August 24, 2001

“This is a story that no one wants to know.”
— Harry Huge, Esq., 1994

I was talking with a friend tonight about my father’s death. My friend said he saw an analogy between my father’s murder and the order given to Francis Gary Powers to kill himself rather than allow himself to be captured by the enemy. The analogy my friend saw lay in the similarity between a national security murder on the one hand, and the order to kill oneself for security on the other hand–the only difference being in whether one’s death comes at the hand of another or at one’s own.

I later realized that the analogy goes further, because the pill Powers was supposed to have taken was concocted by the ubiquitous Sidney Gottlieb, and also because the U2 plane Powers was piloting was the brain child of Richard Bissell who (according to Evan Thomas in The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA) gave considerable thought to the problem of how to murder someone for security reasons while doing so in a way that would seem to be a natural death and would not arouse undue curiosity.

Evan Thomas writes as follows:

Bissell, on the other hand, was “more open-minded,” said Gottlieb. He had, of course, worked closely with the Technical Services Staff developing the U-2. When he became DD/P [Deputy Director of Plans, i.e. covert operations] in 1959, “he was very interested in MKULTRA,” said Gottlieb. “He fancied himself a technological promoter and entrepreneur. He wanted to understand what the farthest reach could be. He wanted to know, could you assassinate someone without anyone every finding out about it?”

At first it was all “speculative,” recalled Bissell. But the concept interested him. If one of the obstacles to assassination was what agency officials called blowback, perhaps there was a technical solution. “I wanted to see if there was a way to make it look like a natural occurrence. This would be the best way to preserve security. You’d shut off curiosity.” (paperback edition, p. 212)

The interesting thing, the amazing thing really about this quote is that it occurs on the very same page (p. 212) where—just eight lines earlier—Thomas tells the story of the death of Frank Olson, who, Thomas says, “worked with Gottlieb, also experimented with LSD and fell to his death from the window of a New York hotel in 1953.”

But Thomas never connects the two subjects. Talk about shutting off curiosity!!!

This example is so good it could be used in literary theory as a case of unconscious reflexivity: inadvertently performing the very thing one is explaining.

It all reminds me a bit of the collage work too. Sometimes a collage-maker will place two images in very close proximity and then, pointing first at one image and then at the other, insists that “This has nothing to do with that.”

Of course one can’t contemplate Bissell’s recommendations for “shutting off curiosity” without being reminded of the CIA’s Assassination Manual of late 1953, where the device of the “contrived accident” is the recommended method for disguising a murder as a suicide:

For secret assassination, either simple or chase, the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated.

The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface…

If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the “horrified witness”, no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary.

And of course one can’t read these passages without thinking of this exchange from the Elmore Leonard novel, BE COOL:

“I know a way,” Elliot said. “Throw him out a window and make it look like he committed suicide.”

Raji said, “Elliot” –like, are you stupid or something? –“the windows in the office don’t open.”

Elliot said, “I don’t mean in the office.”

Raji heard him, but Raji was the boss. Once he said Elliot was wrong or stupid Raji would keep going, have his say.

“Man’s gonna commit suicide. So what he does is run across the room and throw himself through[italics in the original] the window? Breaks the glass? Cuts himself all up?”

Elliot didn’t mean that at all. What he had in mind, take the man to a hotel room like in the Roosevelt and pitch him out from the top floor. But Raji was still talking.

“Nicky leave a suicide note? ‘I can’t take no more of this shit life is handing me, so I’m gonna throw myself through the fuckin window?’ You did it to the man in Haiwa-ya and you think, year, that’s it, that’s how to do it. Man, it’s the dumbest idea I ever heard of.”

(Elmore Leonard,BE COOL, Dell, 1999, p. 233)

The startling similarity of this quote to my father’s story is very likely not entirely coincidental. I met Elmore Leonard in 1996 at a book signing at a bookshop called Killer Books in Washington, together with his friend James Grady who wrote “6 Days of the Condor” (changed to “3 Days of the Condor” for the movie). Grady was very familiar with the Olson story—he had interviewed my sister in 1975 for a Jack Anderson column. I don’t know whether Leonard had known the story before or not, but he followed the exchange between me and Grady with considerable interest.

The remarkable example of Evan Thomas’ failure to see what he himself placed in front of his own eyes on page 212 of The Very Best Men is not the only case where an author has blinked when faced with the Frank Olson story. In some ways an even more startling example is to be found in Ed Regis’ history of Fort Detrick, The Biology of Doom. Regis scatters the Olson story through a number of chapters of his book, which enables him to make it almost a leit motif of his narrative while divesting him of the responsibility to confront the story head on. On page 157 (hardback edition) Regis describes the Tuesday morning when, for the second time after the Deep Creek drugging, Olson arrived at work:

Ruwet now decided that this was far more serious than he’d realized at first. Outside intervention was clearly advisable, not only for Frank Olson’s sake, but for the sake of Camp Detrick and the biological warfare program, and in particular for the overall security of the SO Division. Everyone’s worst nightmare had always been of someone’s flipping out and running amok, and spilling all the family secrets. (p 157-168)

So there it is: the elephant in the room finally named, even if its features remain entirely unexplored. What sorts of contingency plans did Detrick (or any other Cold War facility) have for a situation where a key scientist threatens to pose a security risk? And what if that scientist has been drugged — destabilized — by his own colleagues?

This is the only example of which I am aware where the obvious problem of security in the wake of some kind of psychological breakdown is stated clearly. This was obviously a huge problem in many areas of Cold War research and industry, one which in many cases would have posed horrendous dilemmas for a democracy which did not have the equivalent of a Gulag prison system in which to dispose of people. I know of no work in which any any historian has explored this issue. This makes Regis’ next narrative move all the more interesting.

This is how Regis tells the story of Olson’s death in New York three days later:

Just in case Olson should try to leave the room and wander about the neighborhood as he’d done two nights earlier, Lashbrook took the bed next to the door.

Now, around midnight, they went to bed.

Only ten days previously, Frank Rudolph Olson, Ph.D., had been a branch chief in the Special Operations Division, a trusted employee of the U.S. Government’s secret germ warfare installation at Camp Detrick. Now he was hearing voices, having delusions, and on his way to the crazy house.

He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stay asleep.

At about 3 A.M., with Lashbrook asleep, Frank Olson crashed through the closed window of room 1018A and disappeared below the ledge. (p. 161)

“Disappeared below the ledge”…! The drugged guinea pig — out of control and “on his way to the crazy house” — now disappears below the ledge!

How should we read the word “disappeared”? Should the verb “disappeared” be taken to mean “jumped”? Or should we perhaps take the word “disappeared” in the meaning it has acquired in Latin America, where it is used as a past participle: i.e., the dissidents “were disappeared”?

Regis makes no mention of the fact that this extremely unlikely story derives only from the CIA’s uncorroborated version of events. (See my notes on the interview with Dr. Robert Gibson for one example on a contradictory story, and the new Afterword to Jonathan Moreno’s Undue Risk for a more general discussion.)

Most alarming of all, Regis does not mention that this “disappearance below the ledge“ was, at the very least, extremely convenient for Olson’s caretakers, charged as they were with the security of a high level scientist doing top secret work and now (according to the standard version of the story) completely out of control. What, in fact, would these “caretakers” have done if this scientist — privy to a whole network of secrets involving everything from terminal experiments on human subjects, assassination materials research, mind control experiments, the use of biological weapons in Korea — what would they have done, what could they have done, if Olson had not “disappeared below the ledge” on the very day when he was scheduled to be placed in an open psychiatric hospital with no provision for maintaining security, and with open access to family and friends?

But of course one does not ask questions that lead in the direction of issues that one does not wish to face. In the Agency’s terminology, the ideal tactic is to intercept a question before it has a chance to be stated, thereby “shutting off curiosity” before a direction of thought can be formulated, articulated, and acquire momentum.

This strategy has been remarkably effective. The whole issue of what one might call “Cold War homicides” or “national security murders” has (so far as I am aware) never been raised as a ‘problem of democracy,’ (as my high school civics teacher might has put it). (For an article that raises this issue empirically, though not philosophically, “Mid-century deaths all linked to CIA? New evidence in Olson case suggests similarities with other incidents” by H.P. Albarelli Jr. and John Kelly.) The most candid discussion I have seen of this general problem with reference to the values of a democracy (though murder of a fellow citizen is not mentioned) occurs between two CIA officers in William Buckley’s novel Spytime:

Esterhazy was solemn in his reflection. “Lincoln asked himself a related question, I remember. Along the lines of, Does it further the aims of the Constitution to abide by it when doing so endangers, well, endangers the whole thing–”

“Here are his words exactly. You can understand why I have committed them to memory. Lincoln said, ‘Is there, in all republics, this inherent and fatal weakness? Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?’… Well, Hugo, there’s a good case to be made for declining even to talk about quandaries like that. It’s best left that although the truth may make you free, something less than the whole truth, in some situations, is necessary in order to keep the fire lit.”

Perhaps the most disturbing example of what we might call the phenomenon of ‘the spatially proximate but discursively unconnected’ in the treatment of the death of Frank Olson occurs in Christopher Simpson’s impressive book, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War. It is often more instructive to notice where the story of Frank Olson’s death is told than exactly what is said (the story is usually virtually identical); one frequently has the impression that in choosing the narrative context in which to insert this story an author is implicitly making connections that he has not yet explicitly formulated. To put this differently, an author may know more than he realizes he knows, or, in some cases, more than he wants to know, and, as in a collage, he may convey this knowledge implicitly in choices concerning spatial positioning.

Chapter Eleven of Simpson’s book, “Guerrillas for World War III,” deals with the recruitment of former Nazis to carry out American-ordered assassinations in Europe in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. On pages 149-150 of the paperback edition Simpson writes as follows:

Former Nazi collaborators made excellent executioners in such instances, because of both their wartime training and the fact that the U.S. government could plausibly deny any knowledge of their activities. Suspected double agents were the most common targets for execution. “In the international clandestine operations business, it was part of the code that the one and only remedy for the unfrocked double agent was to kill him” (emphasis added [by Simpson]), the CIA’s director of operations planning during the Truman administration testified before Congress in 1976, “and all double agents knew that. That was part of the occupational hazard of the job.” The former director, whom the government declines to identify, also claimed, however, that he didn’t recall any executions of double agents actually occurring during his tenure there. It is understandable that he might fail to remember any executions; for admitting a role in such killings could well lead to arrest and prosecution for conspiracy to commit murder in Europe, if not in the United States itself.*

The asterisk at the end of this paragraph directs us to a footnote at the bottom of the page — and here it comes: the Frank Olson story as a footnote to assassinations in Europe!

*Unfrocked double agents were also tortured — there is no other word for it — in so-called terminal medical experiments sponsored by the army, navy, and the CIA. These tests fed massive quantities of convulsant and psychedelic drugs to foreign prisoners in an attempt to make them talk, according to CIA records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by author John Marks. The CIA also explored use of psychosurgery and repeated electric shocks directly into the brain.

Then CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of all records of these “experiments” in the midst of Watergate and congressional investigations that threatened to bring to light the agency’s practices in this field. A cache of papers that he accidentally missed was found some years later, however, and the agency has since been forced to make public sanitized versions of some of those records. It is now known that similar agency tests with LSD led to the suicide of an army employee, Frank Olson, and are alleged to have permanently damaged a group of unsuspecting psychiatric patients at a Canadian clinic whose director was working under CIA contract. The agency unit that administered this program was the same Directorate of Scientific Research that developed the exotic poisons used in attempted assassinations of Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba.

So close, and yet so far. How differently the above account reads if one keeps in mind the following facts: (1) Frank Olson was not an army employee; according to the CIA’s own file (the one that Helms “accidentally missed” and therefore did not destroy, and also according to William Colby’s autobiography) Olson was not an army employee; he was, in fact, a “CIA employee;” (2) the Special Operations Division for which Olson worked was closely allied with the CIA, and with the CIA’s efforts to develop methods for “special interrogation;” (3) the CIA officer in charge of the “experiment” in which Olson was drugged (Sidney Gottlieb) was the same man who developed the “exotic poisons” for use in the attempted assassinations of Castro and Lumumba; (4) Gottlieb has testified that the poison for use in the attempted assassination of Lumumba came from the laboratory (Detrick) in which Frank Olson worked; (5) Frank Olson had made a trip to Europe and specifically to Germany on Special Operations business in the summer of 1953 before he was killed in November of that year.

I find it remarkable that the notion of a file being “accidentally missed” finds its way into this account, especially when one considers how many things about the death of Frank Olson the CIA has claimed were “accidents.” To wit: in 1953 the Olson family was told that the death of Frank Olson was an “accident;” when other materials were being shredded in 1973 the file on Frank Olson was “accidentally” not destroyed; when the Rockefeller Commission investigators were gathering materials at the CIA an Agency secretary “accidentally” gave them the Olson file, which was not supposed to be released (this explanation provided to the Olson family by Seymour Hersh); when the Rockefeller Commission came into possession of the Olson file in 1975 they “accidentally” forgot to notify the Olson family that the story of the death of their husband-father, kept secret for twenty-two years, was about to come to light; the CIA also “accidentally” failed to notify the Olson family when they came to know that the Olson story was about to be anonymously disseminated both in the Rockefeller Commission’s report and in the press; the story of Frank Olson’s death as it was described in the notoriously missing file which was “accidentally” not destroyed was that Olson had been “accidentally” kept on a high floor of a hotel during his stay in New York for psychiatric consultation because of an “accidental” failure of judgment in which the severity of his disturbance was underestimated; Sidney Gottlieb told the Olson family in 1984 that he had had no idea that LSD could cause the sort of effects it caused in Olson’s case, and that in that sense the drugging of Olson was a mistake and an “accident.”

What remains striking in Simpson’s account is the placement of the Olson “suicide” story in such close spatial proximity to the accounts of terminal experiments and assassinations in Europe. In this context the memo provided by Gordon Thomas takes on special significance.

The Agency has deflected the question of national security homicides in a double maneuver. On the one hand the CIA has admitted to unsuccessful (and ill-advised) attempts at assassinating foreign leaders, while, on the other hand, the notion of domestic involvement in the assassination of John F. Kennedy has been effectively marginalized as “conspiracy theory” (i.e., lunacy). The result is that the issue of the vast territory that falls between the poles of these extreme cases, what we might call ‘plain old everyday national security terminations,’ has been effectively omitted from the discourse of Cold War history (except of course in Stalin’s Russia where “the end justified the means.”) From the perspective of analyses like that of Michel Foucault one might ask not only about the occasional necessity for such acts, but also about the role such terminations would have played in “disciplining” a democratic population for fighting a Cold War in which covert operations and plausible deniability were the key weapons.

The Evan Thomas-Ed Regis examples are valuable, though, not only from the perspective of questions they raise for political theory but also for the quite complex psychological issues they embody. How do the mechanisms of perception enable the mind to posit a connection and yet avoid seeing it? In order not to see what one does not wish to see how does the mind first recognize a dangerous object precisely in order to intercept and block it? And what is the remedy? How is the mechanism of perception refreshed; how are the mechanisms of internal censorship and repression modified so that inconvenient objects can be perceived and held in mind, awkward questions can be raised?

A few thoughts on the many questions this raises:

The idea of placing one thing near another and then asserting (explicitly or implicitly) that “the one has nothing to do with the other” of course suggests Freud’s comments about negation, where, due to the fact that the unconscious cannot represent a negative relationship, denial always implies affirmation. Even if true, however, this approach conveys little about how the mechanism might actually work, and particularly how it works not only in verbal exchange but in the more primary register of perception.

The most useful line of thought on this problem comes, I think, from philosopher Susanne Langer who in her multivolume study Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling emphasizes that perception is a complex act which consists of many components or phases, not all of which are synchronized and integrated with each other. The early phases of the perceptual act often serve to register the emotional value of the stimulus precisely in order to steer subsequent perceptual phases away from the stimulus or from some aspects of it.

In her explanation of this phenomenon Langer emphasizes the idea that the early phases serve to adumbrate value. She writes:

[…in acts of recognition, motivation and feeling] value may be adumbrated before the perception of forms is complete.

(Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Vol. 1, 1967)

The phenomenon that Langer is seeking to account for here is the seemingly paradoxical fact that one can’t avoid something unless one first recognizes it: one can’t resist seeing something unless one has first seen it. This phenomenon is a familiar one in psychoanalytic experience. As one psychoanalyst (Roy Schafer) put it, the mystery of how the repressed makes its appearance in the psychoanalytic dialogue is that patient “refers to what he is passing over as he passes over it.” The reciprocal task of the psychoanalyst, therefore, becomes that of hearing the alienated voice of the other within the rhythms of the patient’s multivocal speech. This textual nature of this task is one reason why literary theory and psychoanalysis have had such a rich cross-fertilization in recent decades.

But what about the social manifestation of this mechanism in the form of learning to ignore that which (perhaps despite its strangeness) has been made to appear normal or usual? Habituation to that which was in fact quite bizarre was the common experience in my own family, where my father’s death acquired a pseudo-familiarity that served to remove it from the reach of curiosity and thought.

The phenomenon of the dulling of perception through habituation has received a great deal of attention in literary theory, particularly from the Russian formalists who thought that the artist’s challenge was then to regrasp the strangeness of the familiar: the process that has been called “making strange”:

“People living at the seashore,” wrote Shlovskij, “grow so accustomed to the murmur of waves that they never hear it. By the same token, we scarcely ever hear the words which we utter.… We look at each other, but we do not see each other any more. Our perception of the world has withered away, what has remained is mere recognition.”…

The poetic image makes strange the habitual and… its linguistic devices, to use the favorite Formalist expression, are “laid bare.”

(Victor Erlich,Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine, 1981)

Brecht’s epic theater … is a theater that is in certain ways conscious of itself as signifying practice, and that draws attention to its own means of production, its own processes of representation. This quality of self-reflexivity largely derives from the devices of distanciation or alienation… [The] means of representation are foregrounded.… This foregrounding of devices, however, is not so much designed to produce a sense of aesthetic “play”… [as] to offer the audience a place from which it can develop its own criticism of and judgment upon the actions represented.……“the individual episodes have to be knotted together in such a way that the knots are easily noticed.”…

This process of “noticing the knots” or of foregrounding the means of representation has been a familiar one in modernist theory and practice since the time of the cubists.

This long trajectory through the notions of “shutting off curiosity,” motivated perceptual blindness, habituation, and “making strange” brings us, finally, to collage, and to the remarkable observations of German art theorist Franz Mon on the social relevance of this medium:

Collage offers an opportunity for accelerated insight into what happens to us in our reality. In the multiplicity of collage working techniques — ranging from tearing, to burning, cutting, crumpling, ripping, rubbing — one finds analogues to society’s socializing processes and events. In the renderings of collage is disclosed that which social ideology tends to pass over.

Using the material of a given reality collage brings forth, through transposition, ‘another’ reality, which reveals the inner essence of that which has become dulled through habituation. By relieving reality of its rules of the game, collage presents designs for experimentation — patterns which are new, unused, and possibly valid only for the moment.

Only The Shadow Knows

Notes on my meeting with Dr. Robert Gibson
Dec. 20, 1999
Eric Olson

When last-minute plans were being made on the afternoon of November 27, 1953 to hospitalize Frank Olson a call was placed to a young admitting psychiatrist in Maryland named Robert Gibson. (Gibson went on to a very distinguished career in medicine: he became director of Shepherd-Pratt Hospital in Baltimore, and President of the American Psychiatric Association.) The Olson family had never heard this name, and would not learn of Dr. Gibson’s role until 1994. When Dr. Gibson read about the exhumation of Frank Olson’s body he contacted Professor James Starrs, director of the forensic team, to tell his side of the story. This was reported in a January 19, 1995 AP story by reporter Deb Riechmann, the same reporter who had also found a mysterious document in Olson’s personnel file. James Starrs interviewed Dr. Gibson in 1994, and in 1999 I finally decided I should meet him too. The AP story appears below, followed by my notes on that meeting.

I met Dr. Gibson at his home north of Baltimore just after 2:00 p.m. on a rainy Monday afternoon, Dec 20, 1999. Dr. Gibson greeted me at the door together with his two large brown dogs. He then showed me around the ground floor of his large wooden house, which is set in the woods overlooking a large reservoir. Then we settled down, Dr. Gibson on the sofa and me in a large comfortable chair, to begin what became a five-hour conversation.

I told Dr. Gibson that I had re-read the transcript of the conversation he had had with Jim Starrs almost exactly five years earlier, on Dec 21, 1994. {As I mentioned this I was aware for a moment of the almost Proustian expanse of time that has been devoted to solving my father’s murder.] On the low table facing us Dr. Gibson had spread out the materials I had sent him, which included the chronology of this long affair. He directed my attention to an ambiguity in the way I had described what he had said during the meeting he had had with Jim Starrs Gibson pointed out that my description could be read as implying that he had had some sort of affiliation or relation with the CIA, or had access to special information from that source. Dr. Gibson wanted me to understand that this was not and had never been the case.

Dr. Gibson has had a remarkably distinguished career. He was director of Shepherd Pratt Hospital for twenty years, where a building there bears his name. As we turned toward the matter of the CIA Dr. Gibson began by telling me about an event that had occurred when he was president of the American Psychiatric Association. A letter he had sent to the CIA declining cooperation with a study had turned up in the hands of the Scientology Church. How had this occurred? The explanation turned out to be that a member of the Scientology Church had gotten a short term job in Dr. Gibson’s organization just prior to this affair and had had access to office files. I said that I had heard that the Scientology Church reputedly has large files on the CIA’s mind control projects. Dr. Gibson said he found this very believable.

I gave Dr. Gibson a copy of Paul Robeson Jr.’s Nation article, in which Robeson links his father’s drug-manipulated suicide-attempt to my father’s murder, which was disguised as an LSD suicide. Dr. Gibson said he remembered having seen Paul Robeson Jr. play football for Cornell in a game against Penn, where Dr. Gibson had studied.

We then turned to a detailed discussion of the contact that Dr. Gibson had had with one of my father’s caretakers, the “caretaker” who apparently was Robert Lashbrook though Gibson does not remember the name.

In November 1953 Dr. Gibson, then a young doctor of twenty-five, was working as an admitting psychiatrist at Chestnut Lodge Hospital in Rockville, Maryland. He said he received a call late one afternoon—about four P.M. he thinks— inquiring about the possibility of an admission for Dr. Olson. This call was received the day before a second call on the day of Olson’s death informing Gibson that Dr. Olson would not be coming. This means that the first call was received on Nov. 27, 1953, at about 4:00 P.M.

The caller identified himself as a doctor, and Gibson took this to mean that he was a medical doctor. [I do not know whether Dr. Gibson is able to be specific as to whether names were given, either of the caller or the friend. I must ask about this.] The caller said that he was calling from New York where he was with “a friend” who had “been acting strangely” and appeared to require hospitalization. This terse description of Olson’s condition was apparently the only explanation given for requiring hospitalization. Dr. Gibson is certain that he then asked whether the friend to be admitted was currently under the care of a physician, or was receiving any sort of treatment. Dr. Gibson says he can be certain that he asked these questions both because he remembers having done so, and also because he would have routinely asked this.

The answer given by the caller was that Dr. Olson was not currently in treatment and was not under the care of a doctor.

Dr. Gibson then explained that based on this limited information he could not arrange for an admission immediately, but that the patient could be brought in for an examination and that then a recommendation (which might be either an admission or a referral) could be made. The caller then inquired about bringing the patient in that same night. In the discussion that ensued, however, it became clear that the time required to travel from New York to Washington by train and then to come all the way to Rockville would make the arrival very late at night. It would be difficult even to find Chestnut Lodge. It was agreed that the trip should be made the following day.

[I now recall that this explanation for the delay based upon the lateness of the hour contradicts the explanation given in the Colby documents, I think by Lashbrook. There the explanation for coming on Saturday is that the weather in New York was bad and that flights were not departing, the assumption being that Lashbrook and Olson would travel by plane, not by train. I must check this. I have checked the weather for the 27th and 28th, and found that in fact, contarary to what was claimed, the weather was good for flying.]

Dr. Gibson said that normally an immediate hospitalization at Chestnut Lodge would have been impossible, due to the long waiting list which usually required a one year wait. However, on this particular day Dr. Gibson checked the waiting list and found that all those on it had removed their names, so that one bed was in fact available.

The next morning Dr. Gibson arrived about 8:00 a.m. He explained to me that he sometimes did work on Saturdays, so that it is plausible that he would have been at the hospital on Saturday November 28. On his arrival the secretary informed him that a call had just come in concerning the admission he had discussed the previous day. Dr. Gibson then went into his office to take the call.

The caller was the same man with whom Gibson has spoken the day before. The caller said that his friend would not be coming. Hearing this, Dr. Gibson inquired about the reason, asking whether the plans had been changed. The caller explained that the reason was that his friend had died during the night. He then described what had happened. Dr. Gibson said he cannot remember all the words that were used in the explanation, but that was what was told to him had formed an image in his mind of what the situation had been, and this image he remembers very clearly.

The caller said that he had awakened in the middle of the night, whereupon he saw his friend standing in the middle of the room. The caller tried to speak to his friend, but this apparently startled the friend, who then started running and hurled himself through the window. Crashing glass was part of the image that Dr. Gibson remembers. The caller said he had known his friend was dead because “the window was on a high floor of the hotel.”

Dr. Gibson remembers being concerned for the caller, who had apparently witnessed the horrifying death of a friend. Gibson made some inquiries along these lines but doesn’t remember eliciting any particular response.

After recounting this story Dr. Gibson and I discussed a number of questions that naturally arise. One question is why Lashbrook (or Abramson if that was who the caller was) would have called to arrange hospitalization, possibly to begin as early as that same night, if the intention was to kill the patient. A second question is whether, if the hospitalization had occurred, it would have been possible to guarantee a level of security adequate to the concerns of the Agency. A third question is why in 1994, when he was informed of Dr. Gibson’s version of these events, Lashbrook would have responded by saying, “Dr. Gibson must be dreaming.”

As for the first question—why would hospitalization have been arranged for a patient who was slated to be killed?—two answers occurred to us. The first is that some event or chain of events might have occurred after the call was made that resulted in a new decision about what to do with Frank. One element in this may have been the realization that security at the hospital would indeed have posed unsolvable problems. Dr. Abramson, for example, would inevitably have been drawn into the situation, either during the admission process or during treatment. Dr. Abramson makes clear in the Colby documents that he wanted “to be kept out of it.” This is merely the first of a whole series of security problems that would have arisen. Dr. Gibson explained that Chestnut Lodge did not have security-cleared psychiatrists on its staff at that time, and that security would indeed have been a problem had psychotherapeutic treatment begun at Chestnut Lodge.

But, if security was a concern, as it would have had to have been, then the question arises as to why the Agency’s secure mental health facility in Massachusetts was not considered. The obvious answer is that termination, not a secured facility was the course chose. This answer also explains why Lashbrook and Olson stayed in the Statler Hotel, rather than in the safehouse that was available to them in Greenwich Village, ten minutes away by taxi.

A second explanation for arranging hospitalization is that an alibi would have been needed. If Olson’s death was to be explained as a suicide, and if there were numerous signs that he had in fact been suicidal during the days in New York, then it would have appeared suspicious in the extreme if the death had occurred in the absence of any plans for further treatment. This is especially true given that the alleged reason for being in New York to begin with was to receive treatment from Dr. Abramson (which of course was not acknowledged in the call to Gibson). If at the end of three days of consultation with Abramson the patient killed himself (as the story was to be told) then it had to be as an unfortunate event happening before the hospitalization that had been arranged could be put into effect. The impression given was to be, “We did our best, but unfortunately we didn’t quite make it to the hospital.” That was the myth with which I grew up as a child. “Yes they tried to take care of our father,” my brother and sister and I always thought. “But he fell out the window the night before they could get him to a hospital.”

This rationale has the ring of plausibility, and it explains another aspect of the story that otherwise is a gaping hole. This is the question of timing: why were arrangements for hospitalization made so late in the week, and so late in the day? If Abramson’s reports in the Colby documents are to be believed, Abramson had had ample reason to have come to the conclusion early on that Olson required hospitalization. In fact, given his reports the astounding thing is that Olson was permitted to reside on a high floor of a hotel at all during the New York stay.

From the perspective at which we have arrived here, however, one can suspect that a decision to kill Olson would have to have been accompanied by a decision to arrange a spurious hospitalization for him. Both decisions must have been reached some time Friday. By calling Chestnut Lodge so late in the day it was possible to give the impression that immediate care was needed, leaving it to Dr. Gibson to take the responsibility for delaying the arrival for a day. This would create the desired impression of concern, while at the same time avoiding the possibility that Olson would indeed land in a hospital that same night and out of the reach of his CIA “caretakers.” It’s a bit like the story my mother used to tell about my father before he was married. When he knew a woman already had a date for a particular night he would call her up and ask her out. That way he could get credit for being interested and for trying without actually having to spend any money.

This interpretation is given support by another anomaly in the story. Just hours after the arrangement was made to take Frank to Chestnut Lodge the following day he had a phone call with my mother in which he said he would be home that same following day. Had Frank himself not been told of the hospitalization plans, or were these plans bogus—made disingenuously, without serious intent to carry them out? The latter seems overwhelmingly likely.

As for the question of whether security could have been guaranteed at Chestnut Lodge, Dr. Gibson gives a clear negative response. He told me that neither he nor his colleagues had clearances to deal with secret information, and said that the process of psychotherapy would have exposed the whole scenario in which my father was caught.

The third question—why did Lashbrook say what he did in 1994—was raised by Dr. Gibson in response to what he considered to be a strange response by Lashbrook to Gibson’s recounting of the call he received. Dr. Gibson said that the more natural response would not have been “Dr. Gibson must be dreaming,” but, rather, a suggestion that either Lashbrook had spoken to someone else (not Gibson) or that someone else (not Lashbrook) had spoken to Gibson. A call from someone was definitely received by Dr. Gibson, and certainly a call from someone in the Agency to someone at Chestnut Lodge would have to have been made. In either case it seems obvious that if hospitalization had been arranged, as is claimed in the Colby documents and as the family was informed after the death in 1953, then someone must have called the hospital to inform them of the new situation. It is curious that nowhere in the Colby documents is there any mention of a call being made by anyone to Chestnut Lodge to arrange hospitalization, or a call by anyone to cancel the arrangements once made.

But here too an explanation suggests itself. Apparently the cover story was changed later on Saturday morning, after the call to Gibson had been made. The idea that Lashbrook saw the exit through the window was clearly problematic. It must have been decided that the story would be that Lashbrook saw nothing, that he was awakened by the sound of crashing glass, and that by the time he opened his eyes Olson was gone. This story is obviously preferable to one in which Lashbrook sees Olson plunge through the window, which must have been a sort of first rough draft of a cover story. Perhaps Lashbrook, Gottlieb, and or Agency the security officers who were called in subsequently checked their own assassination manual and discovered that the best alibi of choice is one in which it is claimed that the assassination/witness saw nothing. When he looked around the subject was gone.

By the time a satisfactory cover story was decided upon a first draft had apparently already been conveyed to Gibson during the call in which the hospitalization was cancelled. This realization that this was the case must have been an awkward moment. I suspect that Lashbrook and company would have concluded, however that this storm could be weather. If Gibson’s name were kept out of the record nobody would ever hear his version anyway. Nobody would think to call Chestnut Lodge, and Chestnut Lodge would not think to get involved as they would never hear the new version of the story. The contradictions in the cover story would be unlikely to surface.

Were it not for “The Shadow” all that might have been true.

As we were discussing the scenario in New York I mentioned the very strange business involving Frank’s visit to a magician, Dr. Mullholland.
“Oh I met him,” Dr. Gibson said. “My father was a friend of his.”

Stunned by this I pressed Gibson for an explanation.

“My father was a writer and magician,” Dr. Gibson said. He knew all the greatest magicians of the day, Houdini, Blackstone, and Mullholland. He was also a novelist. Have you heard of “The Shadow” novels? He wrote all of those, more than three hundred “Shadow” novels in all.

Then Dr. Gibson’s wife appeared. Turning to her husband she [Diane] said, “If it weren’t for ‘The Shadow’ you might never have contacted Dr. Starrs.”

By this point I was starting to experience a hot flash. Dr. Gibson had met Mullholland! Dr. Gibson’s father the author of “The Shadow”! Not the psychologist Carl Jung’s shadow as the unacknowledged part of the personality, but The Shadow! Had I once again passed through the looking glass? Could the circle of psychiatrists and magicians in this story really be so small that the doctor who was to have admitted my father to the hospital have met the magician who had taught the CIA how to drug my father and whom my father was taken to see during that last fateful week in New York? And, in the context of this endlessly dark story, could the father of the doctor to whom I was now speaking really be the author of the line, “The Shadow knows?” Apparently so.

Dr. Gibson went to the bookshelf and pulled out an an old and cracking volume, a biography of his father William Gibson called “The Man of Magic and Mystery.” Page after page, probably at least sixty pages of this book, were devoted to merely listing the books William Gibson had written, over seven hundred in all. “Yes,” Dr. Gibson said, “my father would go into his study after dinner and start typing on an old Smith Corona typewriter. We would find him in exactly the same position the next morning. By then he would have written over a hundred pages. He never corrected them at all. They went directly to the publisher.”

The rest of the evening with Dr. Gibson was spent discussing the glory days of Chestnut Lodge where in the 1950’s and ’60’s an internationally famous group of psychiatrists was pioneering the treatment of schizophrenia. One of these, Harold Searles, authored a book, “Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects” that is one of the great classics of psychotherapeutic literature, and which I read with enormous profit while treating a schizophrenic patient in Sweden. Dr. Gibson also told me about research he had done using hypnosis to create very precise age regressions in a patient. He also described a book he is currently writing together with a former suicidal patient in which they are exploring the motivations that lead to suicide.

But then the most astounding question occurred to me. Given these connections among LSD, hypnosis schizophrenia, psychiatry, magic, and mystery, could mere chance explain the fact that the Lashbrook-Gottlieb team had somehow contacted Dr. Gibson? Given Gottlieb’s intellectual perspicacity (he had been familiar with the work of the professors with whom I worked in graduate school and even claimed to have financed Robert Lifton’s early work) I found this hard to believe. And yet some things in this tightly woven tale that led to my father’s death must have occurred by mere chance. My old Harvard mentor Henry Murray (who assessed Hitler’s personality for the OSS) used to tell me, “Chance, love, and logic. Can’t be all chance.”

But some of it must be.

Who knows?

“Only The Shadow knows.”

CLOSE

THE SPHINX AND THE SPY

The Clandestine World of John Mulholland
By Michael Edwards

Copyright 2001 by The Genii Corporation.
All Rights Reserved. Reproduced by Permission.

Genii
The Conjuror’s Magazine
April 2001

At mid-century The Sphinx stood as America’s oldest and most prestigious magic magazine. Over its five-decade history, it had become part of the lifeblood of the conjuring world. Then, on June 29, 1953, John Mulholland wrote a letter to journal’s subscribers. “This is to inform you that as of June 1, 1953, the publication of The Sphinx has been suspended. The immediate cause is that my health does not permit me to do the necessary work. My Doctor orders me to confine my efforts at this time to the shows by which I earn my living.”

It was true that Mulholland’s health was not good. An inveterate smoker, he suffered from ulcers, stomach disorders and arthritis. Editing The Sphinxfor twenty-three years had taken a physical and financial toll. But rather than limiting his activities to his live performances, Mulholland had actually embarked on a new endeavor…an endeavor far more secretive than anything in the realm of conjuring. He had entered a world of covert operations, espionage, mind control, drugs, and even death. John Mulholland had gone to work for the CIA.

***

At the time, John Mulholland was one of America’s most highly regarded magicians. An outstanding stage as well as close-up performer, he had become a noted author, lecturer, historian, collector, editor, and world traveler. In many ways, he had helped make magic intellectually respectable.

Mulholland was born in Chicago, Illinois, on June 9, 1898. As a five-year old, he sat enthralled by a performance of Harry Kellar’s. It would begin a lifelong love of conjuring. His family moved to New York when he was quite young and it was there that he began to learn the techniques of the craft. At age 13 Mulholland began taking magic lessons from John William Sargent at $5 an hour. Known as “The Merry Wizard,” the gray-haired, goatee’d Sargent had been President of the Society of American Magicians in 1905-6 and would later serve as Harry Houdini’s secretary from 1918 until 1920. He was a true mentor to young Mulholland and instilled in him not only an appreciation of the art of magic but of its theory, history, and literature.

Mulholland learned his lessons well. He made his debut as a performer when he was 15. While he would be later regarded as one of magic’s great scholars, his academic achievements were somewhat limited. He took a number of courses at both Columbia University and at New York’s City College, but did not attain a degree. From 1918 to 1924, he taught industrial arts at the Horace Mann School in New York. He sold books for a while and then taught at Columbia University before embarking on a career as a full time professional magician.

Over the years, Mulholland developed an enormous range of presentations. He was equally at home performing close-up magic, entertaining a society dinner, or working the mammoth stage at Radio City Music Hall. In 1927 Mulholland gave a lecture in Boston about the magicians of the world, illustrating each vignette with a trick from that nation. It added a new genre for him and for the profession: the magician as lecturer.

After the death of Dr. A. M. Wilson in April of 1930, he took over editorship of The Sphinx. For the next 23 years he would oversee magic’s most influential periodical. He was a prolific writer. Aside from the vast number of articles he penned, he authored such books as Magic in the Making (with Milton M. Smith in 1925), Quicker than the Eye (1932), The Magic and Magicians of the World(1932), The Story of Magic (1935), Beware Familiar Spirits (1938), The Art of Illusion, (1944) reprinted as Magic for Entertaining, The Early Magic Shows (1945), John Mulholland’s Book of Magic (1963), Magic of the World (1965) and The Magical Mind — Key to Successful Communication (with George Gordon in 1967). He had also co-wrote a 1939 magic-detective novel, The Girl in the Cage, with Cortland Fitzsimmons.

Over the years, he amassed one of the world’s finest collections of magic books and memorabilia. His library housed some 4,000 volumes related to conjuring.

His knowledge of tricks seemed inexhaustible, as was his familiarity with the performance, theory, psychology, history, and literature of magic. He served as the consultant on conjuring to the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Merriam-Webster dictionary and at one time was the only magician listed in Who’s Who in America.

***

As America entered the 1950’s, the world around John Mulholland was changing. The Cold War was at its height. U.S. foreign policy had gone from trust to terror. In June of 1950, over one hundred thousand soldiers from Communist North Korea crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, invading the republic to the South. The previous year, Soviet Union had detonated its first atomic bomb. The stakes had become enormous. The consequences of military confrontation could well be global thermonuclear war.

American policy-makers decided that other means – covert means — would have to be instituted to stop the expansion of communism. As a secret study commission under former President Hoover put it:

“It is now clear we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable longstanding concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us.”

The vehicle for this effort was the Central Intelligence Agency.

Within the Agency, there was a concern – almost a panic – that the Russians had developed a frightening new weapon: a drug or technology for controlling men’s minds. A new term had entered the lexicon: “brainwashing.” At show trials in Eastern Europe, dazed defendants had admitted to crimes they hadn’t committed. American prisoners of war, paraded before the press by their North Korean captors, “confessed” in Zombie-like fashion that the US was using chemical and biological warfare against them. When George Kennan, the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, made some inexplicably undiplomatic remarks at a press conference and was declared persona non grata by the Kremlin, American intelligence officials wondered if he had been hypnotized or drugged.

The CIA leadership feared a “mind control gap.”

The Search for a Manchurian Candidate

In early April of 1953, Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles outlined to a Princeton audience the urgency of the situation. Describing “how sinister the battle for men’s minds has become in Soviet hands,” Dulles revealed that the Russians had developed “brain perversion techniques” which must be countered at any price.

The CIA had already begun crafting this counter. On April 3, 1953 Richard Helms, the Agency’s Acting Deputy Director, had proposed an “ultra-sensitive” program of research and development in clandestine chemical and biological warfare.

The goal, Helms wrote, was “to develop a capability in the covert use of biological and chemical materials. This area includes the production of various physiological conditions which could support present or future clandestine operations. Aside from the offensive potential, the development of a comprehensive capability in this field of covert chemical and biological warfare gives us a thorough knowledge of the enemies theoretical potential, thus enabling us to defend ourselves against a foe who might not be as restrained in the use of these techniques as we are. For example: we intend to investigate the development of a chemical material which causes a reversible non-toxic aberrant mental state, the specific nature of which can be reasonably well predicted for each individual. This material could potentially aid in discrediting individuals, eliciting information, implanting suggestion and other forms of mental control.” [2]

The “offensive potential” was unstated, but the aim was clear: to create what later would be known as a “Manchurian Candidate.” The term would come from the title of Richard Condon’s 1959 best seller about a plot to take an American soldier captured in Korea, condition him at a special brainwashing center in Manchuria, and create a remote-controlled assassin programmed to kill the President of the United States. Condon’s book was fiction; the Helm’s plan was not.

In fact, the CIA had already begun exploring the use of chemicals to influence thought and action as well as to incapacitate and even kill. Of particular interest to the Agency was the potential the hallucinogen LSD had in this arena.

Discovered by Dr. Albert Hoffman on April 16, 1943, d-lysergic acid diethylamide — or LSD as it would become known — seemed to be a drug custom-made for the intelligence community. Its intense potency in even miniscule amounts would make it easy to administer covertly. The sense of euphoria and hallucinations that accompanied it might well lead those under interrogation to drop their guard and inhibitions, enabling a free flow of information. Some believed the chemical might even be used to alter the state of a persons being — to convert an enemy agent, to dishearten idealistic adversaries, to reprogram a person’s memory or thoughts, to get an individual to do something he or she otherwise would never do.

The proposed CIA work on drugs and mind manipulation was to remain one of the Agency’s deepest secrets. “Even internally in the CIA, as few individuals as possible should be aware of our interest in these fields and of the identity of those who are working for us.” [3]

On April 13, 1953 Allen Dulles approved the project. The program was to be known as “Project MKULTRA. [4] The “ULTRA” hearkened back to the most closely guarded American-British secret of the Second World War: the breaking of Germany’s military codes. The “M-K” identified the initiative as a CIA Technical Services Staff (TSS) project. This was the division within the Agency responsible for such things as weapons, forgeries, disguises, surveillance equipment and the kindred tools of the espionage trade. Within the TSS, MKULTRA was assigned to the Chemical Division (TSS/CD), a component with functions few others – even within the Technical Services Staff – knew about.

This unit was headed by Sidney Gottlieb, then a 34-year old Bronx native with a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. A brilliant biochemist, Gottlieb was a remarkable, albeit eccentric, man. A socialist in his youth and a Buddhist as an adult, he was on a constant search for meaning in his life. He found some of it in an unrelenting passion for his clandestine labors. He did not appear to be the least bit troubled by the moral ambiguities of intelligence work. He would do virtually anything if he believed it to be in the American interest. Overcoming a pronounced stutter and a clubfoot to rise through the ranks of the CIA, he would later describe himself as the Agency’s “Dr. Strangelove.” Others were less kind. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair termed him America’s “official poisoner.” [5]

The very same day that Allen Dulles approved Project MKULTRA, Sidney Gottlieb went to see John Mulholland.

Gottlieb knew how to mix the potions. The question was how to deliver them secretly.

Mulholland agreed to help.

A Magician Among the Spies

Gottlieb wanted Mulholland to teach intelligence operatives how to use the tools of the magician’s trade – sleight of hand and misdirection – to covertly administer drugs, chemicals and biological agents to unsuspecting victims.

Why Mulholland decided to do this is a matter of some conjecture. The world was a far different and more dangerous place in the early months of 1953 than it is today. The war raged in Korea. The bloody battles of Pork Chop Hill, Eerie and Old Baldy were headline news. Some 50,000 American servicemen had already lost their lives in the conflict and more than 7,000 were prisoners of war. Stalin’s death in March raised tremendous concern about stability in the Kremlin. In the United States, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade was raging. The prevailing mood was one fear, perhaps even paranoia.

“John did not have a political agenda,” says George Gordon, a close friend with whom Mulholland would later write The Magical Mind. “He said ‘yes’ because his government asked him to.”

Mulholland had an enormous sense of public duty. He took great pride in his contributions, however small. That a special edition of his book The Art of Illusion had been printed in a format so that its 160 page text could fit into the shirtpockets of World War II servicemen gave him great satisfaction.

He was very aware of the role other magicians had played in aiding their countries in times of trouble. He had written and lectured about Robert-Houdin’s 1856 mission on behalf of Napoleon III to help quell the Mirabout-led uprising in Algeria. And he was very familiar with the camouflage work Jasper Maskelyne had done for the British government during the Second World War.

Furthermore, the leaders of America’s intelligence community were the kind of men Mulholland could easily like and admire. General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the founder of the Office of Strategic Services, America’s World war II spy agency liked to hire Wall Street lawyers and Ivy League academics to commit espionage. He filled the secret service with confident, intelligent, often daring young men from leading eastern colleges. By the time the CIA was established in 1947, these were the people who ran America’s covert operations. Within the inner circles of American government, they were regarded as the best and the brightest. They planned and acted to keep the country out of war by their stealth and cunning – two qualities Mulholland long admired.

They were also America’s elite. Steward Alsop noted they were called “the Ivy Leaguers, the Socialites, the Establishmentarians.” He himself coined an alternative epithet: “the Bold Easterners.” The CIA, he said, was “positively riddled with Old Grotonians.” [6]

The men heading the CIA effort that Mulholland had been asked to join certainly fit this picture. The Princeton-educated Allen Dulles had been associated with the prestigious Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. His grandfather John W. Foster had been Secretary of State as had been his uncle-by-marriage Robert Lansing. A secret agent in both world wars, Dulles looked like an avuncular professor with his white brush moustache, his tweed suits, and his ever-present pipe. But behind the jovial exterior was a hard and determined leader. His brother John Foster Dulles became Secretary of State on January 31, 1953. Allen took up the CIA post twenty-six days later.

His deputy, Richard Helms, had a different personality but similar roots. His education had included a year at an exclusive Swiss boarding school and another year in Germany. A Williams graduate, he tried his hand at journalism before joining the OSS. He served with Dulles in Germany and stayed within the intelligence community after the war. This prudent, professional spy – the chief of operations of the clandestine services — could be seen playing tennis at the Chevy Chase Club on Sunday mornings clad in long white flannel trousers.

It may not be surprising that John Mulholland, who spent much of his career among in New York’s fashionable society, would find such men fascinating. As Jean Hugard wrote to Orville Meyer: “I believe in reality he (Mulholland) has an inferiority complex. He doesn’t mix with us poor mortals.” [7]

If “The Very Best Men” who made up the CIA were to the magician’s liking, the converse was also true. John Mulholland was precisely kind of person the Agency wanted and needed. Here was a man with a remarkable knowledge of the art of deception – its tools, its techniques, its psychology. And he knew how to keep a secret. Not only had Mulholland made a living from the execution of these skills, he had gained a reputation as conjuring’s most accomplished teacher. By look and demeanor, the magician fit the Agency mold. While his roots were not really Eastern establishment, the tall, slender Mulholland with his prominent nose and thatch of gray hair certainly looked the part. He had entrée to a wide circle of business, governmental, social, academic, and entertainment leaders. A world traveler, he was equally at home on the New York City subway system or entertaining the Sultan of Sulu or the King of Romania.

How and when Mulholland came in first contact with the CIA remains unknown. Evidence suggests that it was in 1952, perhaps earlier. By March of 1953, he was certainly consulting for the Agency and being paid for these “professional services.” Inasmuch as he was billing the government on a biweekly basis, it seems apparent that this was ongoing work with at least some of it related to development of Project MKULTRA. [8]

During their April 13 conversation, Sidney Gottlieb asked Mulholland to put together a proposal for an operations manual applying the magician’s art to clandestine activities. Mulholland summed up his suggestions as to what this covert guide would have to contain in a letter that he sent to Gottlieb the following week.

“I have given the subjects we discussed considerable thought,” Mulholland wrote. “Below is outlined what I believe is necessary adequately to cover instructions for the workers.

“1. Supplying…background facts in order that a complete novice in the subject can appreciate the underlying reasons for the procedures suggested. Part of this background would clarify the erroneous opinions commonly held by those who are familiar with (magician’s techniques). In this section would be given alternative procedures, or modifications, needed by different types of operators (differences in fact or assumed), as well as changes in procedure needed as situations and circumstances vary. The material is necessary in order for the operator to be able to learn how to do those things which are required…

“2. Detailed descriptions of (covert techniques) in all those operations outlined to me. Also variations of techniques according to whether material is in a solid, liquid or gaseous form. Included would be explanations of (the skills) required and how quickly to master such skills. It is understood that no manipulation will be suggested which requires (actions) not normally used, nor any necessitating long practice. To state this positively: all (covert techniques) described would be adaptations of acts usually performed for other purposes. Descriptions also would be given of simple mechanical aids, how to make them, and how to carry them about. Where needed, application of the data given in section 1 would be supplied. The time consuming part of writing this section will be in developing the adaptations and modifications of the best existing (methods) to fit new requirements.

“3. A variety of examples to show in detail how to make use of the (techniques) previously described. These examples would be given with varying situations and the ways to accommodate procedure to meet variations.

“If desired, I am prepared to start work on this project immediately. I believe I can complete the proposed writing in eighteen to twenty weeks. I understand, if I am given this assignment, that you, or your representative, would be willing to check my work at a conference approximately every two weeks.”

Mulholland estimated that the cost for him to do write the manual would be $3,000. [9]

The Secret Book of Secrets

Gottlieb was very enthusiastic about Mulholland’s approach and wanted to move ahead quickly. On May 4, he drafted a Memorandum for the Record spelling out what Mulholland was to do:

“1. The scope of this subproject is the collection, in the form of a concise manual, of as much pertinent information as possible in the fields of (magic as it relates to covert activities). The information collected will be pertinent to the problem of (surreptitiously administering) liquid, solid, or gaseous substances to (unknowing) subjects.

“2. The information will be collected principally from the previous studies made by Mr. Mulholland in connection with various problems he has considered. Mr. Mulholland seems well qualified to execute this study. He has been a successful (performer) of all forms of prestidigitation. He has made a careful and exhaustive study of the history of prestidigitation and is the possessor of an extensive library of old volumes in this field. He has further seriously studied the psychology of deception and has instructed graduate students…

“3. The period of time covered by this request covers six months from the date of commencement of work by Mr. Mulholland and the costs will not exceed $3,000.”

Mulholland’s proposal was approved that same day and $3,000 was set aside to cover its cost. It would become Project MKULTRA, Subproject 4. [10]

MKULTRA – and its component parts – had already become one of the Agency’s most secret operations. Mulholland’s work, along with that of others working on the project, was considered “ultra sensitive.” Consequently, there would be no formal documents that would associate CIA or the Government with the work in question. Instead, the Technical Services Staff was to reach “an understanding with the individuals who will perform the work as to the conditions under which the work will be performed and reimbursement arranged. No standard contract will be signed.” [11]

On May 5, Gottlieb, in accordance with this procedure, wrote the magician that “The project outlined in your letter of April 20 has been approved by us, and you are hereby authorized to spend up to $3,000 in the next six months in the execution of this work.” No contract or formal agreement was enclosed or ever signed per CIA policy. However, the letter did include a check for $150 to cover Mulholland’s latest work for the agency (March 18th – April 13th). In terms of when Gottlieb and Mulholland could next meet, the chemist noted “A very crowded schedule of travel makes it necessary for us to delay until June 8thour next visit with you. An effective alternative to this would be for you to come..on May, 13, 14, or 15 to discuss the current status of the work. Is this possible?” [12]

Mulholland wrote Gottlieb back on May 11. “Thank you for the notification that my project has been approved. I understand the stipulations. I am resuming work today.” Enclosed was a signed receipt for the check and a notation that Gottlieb’s missive had taken longer than expected to reach him. “Due to the fact that your letter was addressed to (a former address), it was delayed in reaching me. That was an apartment from which I moved …years ago. The fact that the letter did reach me shows the cordial relationship I have with my local Post Office. My present address is above.” [13] He made no comment on how such an error could occur on such a confidential issue.

Mulholland was keenly aware of the project’s sensitivity. Among the stipulations was a commitment to total secrecy. Even the manuscript itself would have to be written in a manner that protected the Agency should it fall into the wrong hands. There would be no references to “agents” or “operatives.” Instead, covert workers would be called “performers;” covert actions would simply be labeled “tricks.”

Mulholland immediately set about the task of researching and writing the manual. While he continued his performance schedule, he cleared his calendar of other commitments. He stopped giving magic lessons, put off work on other writing assignments, and suspended publication of The Sphinx.

Ending The Sphinx was a major step for Mulholland and for the magic community. Begun in Chicago in March of 1902 and subsequently housed in Kansas City and finally New York, this staid yet controversial periodical had become the most influential of magic journals. Mulholland had taken over the publication with Volume 29 Number 3 in May of 1930. [14] It was a source of great joy for him. It was also a tremendous burden.

“For 23 years, I have edited The Sphinx as a labor of love and without financial reward. Each of these years I have spent a great amount of time, and considerable money, to produce a magazine of service to the professional magician and to the serious student of magic. The magazine has been a professional publication and never has catered to those who look on magic as a sort of game. I realized I could not go on forever and for the past several years I have been searching for some individual, or group, qualified to take over the editing and publication of The Sphinxand maintain its standards. I found no such person, or persons, and until such is, or are, found the publication of the magazine will be suspended.

“I wish to express my appreciation to the many loyal readers, and above all to the contributors who made my editorship such a rewarding endeavor. It has been a source of deep personal gratification to know how well The Sphinx has been received during the years.” [15] The final issue, the 597th, was Volume 52, #1, dated March 1953.

For the next several months, he worked continuously on the MKULTRA project. [16] He soon found, however, that if it were to meet the CIA’s expectations, his manual would have to be far more than a hypothetical extension of existing magic tricks, principles and methods to covert activities. He was going to have to create real world solutions to real world problems. He and Gottlieb discussed the challenge.

On August 3, Gottlieb set up a new subproject (Subproject 15) in order “to expand the original provisions of subproject 4 to include an allowance for travel for Mr. Mulholland and for operational supplies used in the course of this project.” Mulholland and the Agency, Gottlieb wrote, needed to meet more frequently in order to consult on the details of the manual and the travel allowance would facilitate Mulholland’s coming to Washington for some of these discussions. Furthermore, he noted, “Certain portions of subproject 4 require experimental verification by Mr. Mulholland. The item for operational supplies is intended to provide for the purchase of supplies used to test or verify ideas. The cost estimate for subproject 15 is $700.00 for a period of six months.”[17]

Even with these additional resources, Mulholland found the project a greater challenge than he expected. Getting it right was imperative. The consequences of a magic trick going wrong might be embarrassment or a decline in bookings; a covert operation going bad could cost an agent his or her life. He met with Gottlieb in late summer to discuss the matter. Gottlieb agreed to consider extending the time to meet this need.

On September 18, Gottlieb filed an amendment to the MKULTRA Project Records that noted “The time period for the original proposal by Mr. Mulholland was six months, which would expire about 11 October 1953. The unusual nature of this manual demands that it be a creative project… rather than a mere compilation of already existing knowledge. For this reason the time estimates are difficult to make in advance and it is apparent at this time that the estimate was too short for the adequate preparation of this manual. It is in the best interests of the Agency to extend this time limit and obtain the best possible manual rather than hold Mr. Mulholland to the six-month period. It is requested that the original six month time period be extended an additional six months. There is no change in the original cost estimate or the original agenda.” [18]

That same day, Gottlieb wrote to Mulholland: “This is at least a partial answer to the questions you asked the last time I saw you. According to my records, your initial estimate was six months, which would expire about October 11, I am initiating a six month extension of the original estimate, which should more than take care of the time factor. The original cost was $3,000.00, of which $1,500.00 is remaining as of now. [19]

Mulholland devoted his energies to the project and by November his first draft was complete. But neither the magician nor the Agency were completely satisfied with the product. As Mulholland wrote Gottlieb on November 11:

“The manual as it now stands consists of the following five sections:

“1. Underlying bases for the successful performance of tricks and the background of the psychological principles by which they operate.

“2. Tricks with pills.

“3. Tricks with loose solids.

“4. Tricks with liquids.

“5. Tricks by which small objects may be obtained secretly. This section was not considered inmy original outline and was suggested subsequently to me. I was, however, able to add it without necessitating extension of the number of weeks requested for the writing. Another completed task not noted in the outline was making models of such equipment as has been described in the manual.”

“As sections 2,3,4, and 5 were written solely for use by men working alone the manual needs two further sections. One section would give modified, or different, tricks and techniques of performance so that the tricks could be performed by women. The other section would describe tricks suitable for two or more people working in collaboration. In both these proposed sections the tricks would differ considerably from those which have been described.

“I believe that properly to devise the required techniques and devices and to describe them in writing would require 12 working weeks to complete the two sections. However, I cannot now work on this project every week and would hesitate to promise completion prior to the first of May, 1954.” [20]

Mulholland estimated that it would cost $1800 to finish the project. [21]

Gottlieb, whose goal was an operational guide that would be of use to agents in the real world, shared Mulholland’s view that broadening its scope to include collaborative efforts by teams of operatives or by female agents was well worth the delay. On November 17, he authorized Mulholland to draft the two additional chapters and extended the timeline for completion of the book until May. This new work became MKULTRA Subproject 19. [22]

Impressed with Mulholland’s range of knowledge and analysis, the CIA was beginning to extend its relationship with the magician beyond just the preparation of the covert operations manual. By now, the Agency was utilizing more and more of his expert advice. His ongoing meetings with the TSS staff accelerated. In December 9, Gottlieb expanded MKULTRA’s Subproject 19 to increase the travel and operational supplies available to Mulholland and to provide for even more consultation between the conjuror and CD/TSS. At the same time, he was asked to take on yet another assignment: to work with the Agency “in connection with an investigation of claims in the general field of parapsychology…” [23]

The CIA was fascinated by the idea of mind reading and thought transmittal. If possible, such extrasensory abilities would be among the most potent weapons in their arsenal. It would revolutionize both the obtaining and the delivery of secret information. At one point, the Agency had been approached by a man claiming to be a “genuine mystic” who had developed a system for sending and receiving telepathic messages anywhere in the world. Mulholland’s task was to evaluate this and other claims of telepathy and clairvoyance.

Mulholland, a hard-nosed skeptic, was right at home investigating the paranormal. He had been lecturing on the topic since 1930, when he began exposing the means and methods of fortunetellers. He soon broadened this to debunk and denounce other forms of occultism. By 1938, he had written a book on the subject, Beware Familiar Spirits, which traced the history of modern spiritualism and described its techniques. He had no interest in letting the assertions of “mystics,” clairvoyants and mind readers go unchallenged.

With increasing frequency, someone inside the Agency would want an explanation for something they had seen or heard and Mulholland was asked to explain it. In virtually every case it would turn to have been accomplished through the stagecraft of magic. This would not stop the CIA – or other branches of the United States Government – from spending enormous resources over the next three decades to explore the possibilities of parapsychology and remote viewing.

With this additional work at hand, it was soon evident that Mulholland would not be able to have the manual finished as anticipated. “An extension of time is needed to give Mr. Mulholland more time to complete this task,” Gottlieb wrote. “The original estimated completion date was May 1, 1954. It is noted that the completion date estimate is now extended to November 1, 1954.” [24]

In the spring of 1954, Mulholland found himself facing an unforeseen problem. Much of his income for the previous year had come from the CIA for work that he knew was to be kept absolutely secret…even from other branches of the United States Government. But now it was time for him to prepare his taxes. Mulholland requested instructions from the Agency on how he was to report this income to the Internal Revenue Service and what he should do if he were audited or questioned by the IRS.

An internal CIA memo spelled out the problem: “Mr. Mulholland is a self employed magician whose normal income is derived from payment by various individuals and organizations for individual performances. Although not applying to calendar year 1953, other characteristic sources of income are from publishers of books, etc., and from individuals to whom he has given instructions in magic. When preparing his Federal Income Tax form, income is customarily listed by individual performances, etc., with the person or organization paying for the performance, the location of the performance, the amount received, and the deductions itemized for each performance or each source of funds, rather than for a standard deduction to be taken. As may or may not be characteristic with professional performers, these deductions are often questioned by the Internal Revenue people, and Mr. Mulholland is frequently called on to justify some of his deductions. For this reason, a detailed record book is kept of his income, with a separate page for each performance or source of income.”

While acknowledgement of the magician receiving payments from the Agency was not felt to be a breach of security in itself, the CIA believed that it was absolutely imperative that the nature of Mulholland’s work be kept from IRS scrutiny. “After several conferences with the Assistant General Counsel of the Agency, and the Security Officer for TSS, the following was recommended: Mr. Mulholland should report all funds received from CD/TSS except for funds for travel expenses, but no attempt should be made to itemize deductions based on these funds. Income tax should be paid on the entire amount reported. Mr. Mulholland should determine a conservative value for the amount of tax paid in excess of what would have been paid if reasonable deductions were made. The reason for this was the feeling that any questions by the Internal Revenue people concerning funds paid by CD/TSS would be prompted by questions on deductions made. It was recommended that the excess tax paid by Mr. Mulholland be refunded by the CD/TSS.” [25] This recommendation was immediately accepted “to protect the security of the Agency.” [26]

Mulholland followed the Agency’s instructions and was reimbursed by the CIA for the excess taxes that resulted from this approach [27]Subproject 15 was expanded to include this financial arrangement [28] and similar agreements were instituted for subsequent years in which he received remuneration from the Agency. [29]

Operational Applications of the Art of Deception

Mulholland continued work on the operational guide throughout the spring and summer. The text was completed by early fall. But the magician had one more task to do – to help prepare drawings, diagrams and photographs to illustrate the book’s proposed techniques. [30] By winter, the manuscript was finally complete. It was titled Some Operational Applications of the Art of Deception.

“The purpose of this paper,” Mulholland wrote in the introduction, “is to instruct the reader so he may learn to perform a variety of acts secretly and indetectably. In short, here are instructions in deception.” [31]

The following eight chapters – illustrated with diagrams hand-drawn by Mulholland – ran over 100 pages and outlined how to apply the magician’s art to the needs of espionage and covert activity. It covered how to administer pills, liquids, gasses and loose solids surreptitiously. It discussed means of obtaining small objects secretly. It proposed strategies and tactics to fit the needs of female agents. And it put forth techniques that could be used by teams of men working in tandem. All this was set forth in language that adhered to the original stipulations put to Mulholland in April of 1953. The language of the manual had to sound like a simple magic text without any words or examples that would connect it to its true clandestine use.

But this was not some primer for amateur magicians to learn a few tricks. No matter how gentle the language, this was to be a guide for agents in the field to perform dangerous, provocative and even lethal acts. The solids, gases and liquids were not harmless substances. What Mulholland was teaching CIA operatives to do was surreptitiously administer mind-altering chemicals, biological agents, dangerous drugs, and lethal poisons in order to disorient, discredit, injure, and even kill people.

Today – five decades after it was written – the tricks and approaches set forth in this manual are still classified “top secret.”

Mulholland’s name appears nowhere on the document, but – consciously or not — he did leave a subtle trace: the illustrations he sketched detailing facial expressions look very much like self-portraits. This notwithstanding, Some Operational Applications of the Art of Deception remains John Mulholland’s most secret book of secrets.

A Member of the Team

While the operational manual was now complete, John Mulholland’s work for the CIA was far from over. He had become part of the MKULTRA team and the Agency was already employing his knowledge and skills in a wide range of ways.

In October of 1954, Mulholland’s agreement with the CIA was extended to include his assistance in the “design of devices for the covert delivery of materials” as well as provide for “such other travel and services as may be desired from Mr. Mulholland at various times.” [32]

The following summer, the Agency asked the magician to undertake another assignment. The success of intelligence operations almost always rests on the ability to transmit information clandestinely. Theirs, after all, is a world of secrets. Mulholland’s manual had spelled out how to administer materials – notably pills, liquids, and loose solids – to unsuspecting victims through the tricks of the magician’s trade. He was also helping the Technical Services Staff design devices to carry this out. Now he was to show the intelligence community how to use the methods of magic to exchange information covertly with one another. Furthermore, he was to use his knowledge and creativity to fashion new methods that were unknown even to the conjuring community.

On August 25, Gottlieb outlined this new project “on the application of the magician’s art to the covert communication of information” in a confidential CIA memo. According to Gottlieb, “this would involve the application of techniques and principles employed by ‘magicians, ‘mind readers’ etc, to communicate information, and the development of new techniques. It is contemplated the above would provide a contribution to the general efforts in the area of non-electrical means of communication. Mr. Mulholland has agreed to undertake this task.” Mulholland’s compensation for this was raised from $150.00 per week to $200.00 per week. [33]